Up to seven widebody jets used to land at Heathrow each morning from South Africa, feeding hundreds of tourists into the UK. What is remarkable is that this was from a premium paying source market where each South African traveller had to get a visa.
How long will it be before this traffic is restored for the British tourism industry? Based on the visa barometer where SA travel agents report on their clients’ attempts to get an appointment with the British High Commission and the subsequent processing time, the answer is never.
The broken UK visa machine in South Africa is going backwards.
According to Travel News’s visa barometer, the wait for an appointment has increased from 1,7 weeks in the last two weeks of July to 8,7 weeks in the first two weeks of August.
In the same periods, the additional processing time has slightly improved from 6,2 weeks to five weeks.
Compare this to Australia where it takes a week to get an appointment and two weeks to process the visa.
What is galling is that for many South Africans involved in this frustrating dance of planning and cancelling, South Africa does not require UK citizens to have a visa.
This is particularly galling for those families whose parents and grandparents served with the allies in two world wars. They were often in UK units, like Roger Bushell of Springs who was in the Royal Air Force and who was escape chairman of the Great Escape at Stalag Luft 111 and executed by the Gestapo.
Like my wife’s grandfather who joined the Royal Artillery and was blown up at the Battle of Arras, her grandmother’s brother who died at El-Alamein, my uncle who spent three years as a POW in Germany – what would they think?
