Vietnam to North Korea visa requirements

A visa is required. Vietnamese ordinary passport holders cannot enter North Korea (DPRK) visa-free or on arrival — only Vietnamese diplomatic/official passports have an exemption. Independent travel is impossible: you must book a state-approved guided tour, and the licensed tour operator arranges your DPRK visa (issued as a separate tourist card, not stamped in your passport). Note that as of 2026 general tourism is still largely suspended. A Vietnam ordinary passport holder needs a visa to visit North Korea (DPRK) for tourism. There is no visa-free or visa-on-arrival channel for ordinary passports — the visa-waiver lists only cover Vietnamese diplomatic and official passport holders, not tourists. North Korea does not permit independent tourism at all: every visitor must be on a guided tour run by an operator registered with the State General Bureau of Tourist Guidance. That operator submits your passport scan and tour details to Pyongyang and obtains the DPRK tourist visa, which is issued as a separate slip of paper (a tourist card) rather than a sticker or stamp in your passport. You typically receive it from your guide the day before the tour or at the point of entry. South Korean and U.S. passport holders are barred from tourist visas; Japanese nationals have also been excluded in recent reopening windows — Vietnamese nationals are not on those exclusion lists in principle. The practical obstacle in 2026 is timing: North Korea reopened the Rason Special Economic Zone briefly in early 2025 (open to most nationalities except Japan, South Korea and the U.S.), then suspended it again on 5 March 2025; Pyongyang and the rest of the country remain closed to general tourists, with only Russian state-arranged groups operating. Travelers should therefore treat the visa as obtainable only when and where tours are actually running, and should verify current status with a licensed operator and the nearest DPRK embassy before making any non-refundable plans.