Long waiting times for visa appointments for Italy and Switzerland visas may soon be over.
VFS told Travel News that in June the two countries had introduced pre-payments online for visa appointments – this ensures the commitment of the visa-seeker to the appointment, and discourages the casual ‘visa-shopper’ who may book several appointments and change their mind during the long wait.
These two visas, along with visas for Portugal, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Sweden, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Croatia and Norway, are administrated in South Africa by VFS – but so far, it’s only those two countries out of the twelve that are fixing the problem of the backlog in appointments.
The serious dearth of appointments has two causes – understaffing at embassies and consulates, who determine the number of appointments that VFS may allocate in a week, and no-shows caused by visa-shopping, and agents (and touts) blocking off lots of appointments that they hope to pass on to clients in the future.
Travel News is currently investigating the extent of the problem of the waits for visas in South Africa, asking agents to report wait times by going to the info collection form here to enter information. This information goes into the Visa Barometer here – we intend engaging with the tourism organisations of the poorly performing countries to apply pressure. Travel agent readers can help us by entering the information for every visa that comes to their desk.
Hariprasad Viswanathan, head Sub-Saharan Africa of VFS Global, explained to Travel News that the pre-payment system for appointments for those two countries was implemented only in June, and this meant that the problem of no-shows would gradually work its way out of the system, for those countries at least.
This should mean that the average six weeks’ waiting time for an appointment for Italy, as shown on the Visa Barometer, will narrow down.
Right now, it’s only Italy and Switzerland that have mandatory pre-payments in the VFS site, but it’s a trend that will go a long way to stop the wastage of appointments, which are one of the contributing factors causing the long waits getting in the way of travel.
Viswanathan explained that the decision to allow pre-payment for appointments rested with the country issuing the visa, not with VFS.
And, of course, those who booked before the introduction of the pre-payment system might still be no-shows, blocking up the system.
This pre-payment is not an additional fee, but is absorbed into the normal administration fee charged by VFS.
In the digital appointment process, the online payment can be made by debit/credit card through the secure online portal, or it may be done via a pre-payment at Standard Bank , following the instructions on the site.
After payment has been made, the client must visit their online application form after three working days, and then proceed to schedule their appointment.
The client may also reschedule the appointment to another date, but the name of the person in the visa may not be changed.
