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Colombia can refuse entry to travellers without a return ticket — but the frequently-quoted Colombian sentence is about visa nationals, not visa-exempt tourists.
An official page or statute states this condition. The wording is quoted below and the source is linked.
Last verified 5 August 2026 · South America
“You may be denied entry to Colombia if you do not have a return ticket.”
What the rule actually says
That English sentence is the strongest confirmed statement available, which is an unusual position for a country to be in.
The Colombian sentence everybody quotes — that the migration control authority "exigirá al extranjero demostrar que está en posesión del correspondiente tiquete de salida" — sits under the Cancillería's V-Turismo *visa* section. It therefore addresses nationals who need a visa to enter. US, Canadian and Australian travellers are visa-exempt, so quoting it at them is a scope error, and it is a common one.
The instrument that actually binds visa-exempt tourists is Resolución 3167 de 2019, which could not be retrieved.
Who checks
Framed as a risk of refusal at entry. What airlines do at check-in is not published by Colombia or by anyone else in a form that can be verified.
A note on airline enforcement, because almost every page on this subject states it as fact: airlines screen these rules through IATA Timatic, a paid business product with no public interface. Nobody outside the industry can check what it says for a given route on a given day. New Zealand is the only authority in this set whose own published text names the check-in desk.
What would make this wrong
- Colombia's official entry-requirements page returns HTTP 200 with a completely empty body — the country currently has no working public entry-requirements page. cancilleria.gov.co blocked automated retrieval.
Sources
- Requisitos de entrada y salida del país (Migración Colombia)
- Colombia travel advice: entry requirements (UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office — another government's summary, used because the destination's own page could not be retrieved)
Airports in Colombia
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Elsewhere in South America
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