This is a minor issue but it is a sign that the government is recognizing that they are refusing too many visa applications for very silly reasons.
It has been reported that a lot of people have abandoned plans to visit Vietnam, a country that is currently attempting to boost their overseas tourism numbers, because their visas are being rejected for very petty and silly reasons. As I detailed previously, they have recently gone to an E-Visa system that allows people to apply for the visa without visiting a consulate in their home country, and this is a good thing. Unfortunately the system is very unforgiving and people are being rejected for a wide variety of reasons such as not having exactly the right photo size in pixels, entering an invalid exit date (it has to be within 3 months of entry) and also not entering a middle name when the person in question doesn't actually have a middle name.
src
The government almost never admits fault publicly here in Vietnam and in this instance they didn't really have to. When they rolled back the online application form to the older format without telling anyone why, it was basically the writing on the wall - they knew they done screwed up. To make this non-admission a bad thing though, they simply didn't tell the public directly and for a few days the new website simply didn't work at all. Later, the new website simply redirected to the old one although many people's browser security considers this a "hijacking" by the website and wouldn't allow the redirect. The Vietnamese government solved this problem by swapping the URL's for the sites, something that even a teenager would be able to do.
Now before it sounds like I am going on an anti-Vietnam rant please know that I am not . I love it here and I hope I can stay for years and years. However, when you stay here for a bit you will quickly realize that the government is not one that will ever admit fault and instead of saying sorry and fixing something they try to hide the fact that the problem ever existed in the first place. Agents who have information regarding the changes are extremely unlikely to publicly tell anyone that these changes happened or even worse, why they happened, out of fear that their criticism will result in them being denied access to Immigration services. So basically, if you find anything out about what is going on with Immigration in Vietnam you have to do so by word of mouth because everyone is afraid to ever say anything about what is going on.
So here is what is going on. Vietnam recently stopped making the "port of entry" a requirement on the Evisa application. You CAN put that information in if you want to, but even if you leave it blank it will still process the visa application. There is no official word about this but according the agent that I use locally who will remain nameless this is because a bunch of people arriving in Vietnam were being denied entry because of the fact that their Evisa port of entry didn't match the one they put on the Evisa. There are a lot of reasons why this can happen such as someone who is going to multiple SE Asian countries and finds themselves in a place that doesn't fly directly to the city that they intend to visit in Vietnam.
For example: Da Nang is where I live. This is one of the most popular places for international visitors in the country. We have an Immigration office and an international airport. The airport is really small though and doesn't have very many international destinations or arrivals. Therefore, if someone was outside of Vietnam and their intended destination was Da Nang, they might be REQUIRED to first fly through Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. For the most part the people would find out at the check in counter that they are not allowed to board the flight but there are also stories of people who arrive in Hanoi or HCMC who are already there and are told they have to board a flight out of the country because they arrived at the wrong port of entry.
Regardless of which of these scenarios happens to someone they are going to be really annoyed and many of them just decide to not visit Vietnam at all as a consequence. If you think about it, what difference does it really make which port of entry you actually arrive at? The computer system is meant to apply to all of the country, is it not?
To make matters worse for the people that find themselves in this situation, the Evisa normally only has a period of validity of 48 hours, so if they had to book another flight, there are many instances in which arriving in that time window wouldn't be possible.
src
you must arrive on EXACTLY that day
So the speculation right now is that although they wont admit fault, the government here is recognizing that this is a silly requirement on the form that really has no bearing in security or anything else really. The people who enforce it at the Immigration kiosks are not jerks, they are simply required to enforce this rule because they were told it is a rule. There might be some practical reason for this requirement for some people, but not for your run-of-the-mill tourist.
The good news is that you don't even have to put a port of entry on the form at all now. Hopefully they will eliminate the rather silly 24-48 hour window of opportunity to arrive as well. I know of no other country in the world that forces you to arrive on a specific day. Every other visa I have ever obtained had a 3-12 month window of opportunity to arrive as the visa was simply a letter allowing you to visit at your leisure - which is what vacation is supposed to be all about anyway, isn't it?
Hopefully this one step will lead to others because if Vietnam truly does want to have more tourism, they need to make the maze of an application process something a bit more accessible.