Visa questions

Applying for visas is never an easy process. Something about the officialness of the forms always brings about a sense of panic in me. I wonder if I’m not answering the questions right. Why do they want to know this? How do I answer that question? What do they really want to know?

We’re currently applying for visas for an upcoming trip and we’ve been filling in the forms. It’s an e-visa so is supposed to be a simpler process but there are still four pages of information to complete.

We have applied for visas for this country before, so we knew the kind of questions we would be asked, but when we come up against them again, we are reminded how ridiculous the process is.

Fair enough, you have to provide information such as your full name, your address, your passport details, the name of your hotel. This is all standard for a visa application.

Then we get to page two. We have to provide information on our education levels and employment status. The drop-down box for education covers everything from illiterate to postgraduate and PhD. They want the address of your employer, the business sector, your job title. Then there is a secondary box, where they want us to give information about previous employment.

I have been working for the same employer for more than 20 years now, so I don’t think my previous employment is useful for me to share with the people processing my visa so I mark this box N/A. (I guess we’ll find out later if that was a mistake.)

Page three. Here are the questions about my parents. They want my father‘s full name, my mother‘s full name and where were they born. And because this country has a degree of difficulty in its relationship with one of its neighbours, there’s also a special box to tick in case either of my grandparents were born in this neighbouring country.

Oh yes, they also want to know what religion I am. There is a helpful drop-down box with several options here (Athiest doesn’t seem to be an option. Neither is Jedi. You must belong to a mainstream world religion.) What are they going to do with this information?

Page four. They want to know what other countries have you been to in the last 10 years. Oh no, Husband and I groan. Last time we filled in this form some years ago, the box was text delimited and we only got three years back before we ran out of room. Now they have a handy type/click selection tool to fill in the box. I open Facebook and start scrolling back through holiday photos, Husband and I adding countries as we go. However I’ve been on a few trips separate to him, so there are extra places on my list. We think we have the comprehensive list at last. I’m somewhere above 30 countries and he’s in the high 20s. We hit save to move onto the next section.

Computer says no. The maximum you can enter in this box is 20 countries. This is annoying as again we have to make a unilateral decision on which countries to exclude. Do we take out the ones furthest back in time or the ones we stayed in the least amount of time? Does this even matter? How is someone in this country’s visa processing office going to be able to check any of this, and why do they need to check any of this?

Then we get to the “previous travel to this country” information. Have you had a Visa for this country before? What was the number of the visa? Yes, we have been before but now we have to search back through the emails to find the reference number from the previous visa. Luckily we still have those old emails!

There is a section on your previous travel in this country that pops up when we say we’ve been there before. When when were you here? What cities did you visit? Where did you stay? This is an impossible question to answer within the confines of the boxes they’ve given us because our last visit was a three week tour and we visited and stayed in multiple cities so more than one address would apply. But I guess what they want is the address we used for our last visa application. Luckily the travel company is still running and still uses the same hotel so we can copy that information from their website. (Are they going to ring up the hotel that we stayed in seven years ago and ask if they remember two British people who stayed there for a couple of days ?)

Final page. We also have to upload passport photos and photos of our passports that meet strict file size, type and pixel requirements. This requires a bit of faffing about because obviously the most recent passport photos I had done for my most recent passport do not meet the size requirements so they have to be cropped. They have to be resized. This all takes extra minutes and then we have to do it again because Husband’s files also have to be adjusted and he’s got no patience for that sort of thing so I ended up doing it for him.

Finally the forms are completely filled in and the necessary files are uploaded. We can move onto the payment page.

PayPal is an option, but oh no, how long is it since I’ve used PayPal? What’s my password? Can I remember it or do I need to go through the reset process? Dealing with PayPal is probably the least stressful part of the whole process as we both can remember our PayPal account details successfully and payment is submitted. We even get an email confirming that they received our payment and our forms. So now we wait 72 hours to see if our form filling was successful and our visas are granted.

All this form filling generates a ridiculous amount of information. I can’t see how most of this is relevant to me asking for a visa. I think most of this will also be useless to them. How does it benefit them to know my father‘s middle name? Or where my mother was born? Why do they want to know where I visited on my previous trip? How would they know if I lied?

Obviously I wouldn’t lie. I’m a complaint form filler. Whatever they ask I’ll tell them I’m just curious how they would know if I lied.

***I’ve scheduled this post to go live after I get back. You never know who is reading!