China Visa Questions
 

Now as I fill out my application for a Visa,I am sending a copy of my plane tickets and I am wondering if they need to have "every day of my itinerary and hotel reservations", or just hotel reservations the first week I arrive? I have the first week hotel booked, but nothing else yet. If they need the entire trip planned, what if you change your itinerary due to weather or other reasons, how is this handled? Or what if you want to stay an extra day somewhere, is this not allowed?

Hi Lollylo25. We gave them our three hotel reservations and nothing about internal flights when we applied in June. We did give them the dates and flights for entering and leaving China. Once in China we changed hotels and the time spent in a couple of cities. No one said anything.

Colduphore:
Thanks! I was beginning to wonder if I had to have every day planned in advance, which would be a very difficult thing for me to do...I like to have some flexibility in my schedule depending upon the people I meet & how much I may really enjoy a place. As I plan to stay in some hostels, they usually ask for a booking deposit in advance, so I pretty much would need to know I will be there if I don't want to lose the deposit money.

You know, at present the Visa policy is very strict in China. You need to send provide the things you mentioned in your questions.
I suggest you just do what you have planed and send your plan to the government of China.
Next year, everything could be better.

My visa application went in this morning in NYC. In and out of the office in 20 minutes. In the application I had included copies of my 4 hotel reservations and airline tickets. There were many undocumented nights since I haven't made all the arrangments yet.

My impression is that you don't need hotels for the entire trip.

NY woman
Through mychinavisa.com, the application asked for hotel reservations for ~all~ nights of my stay in China. I made some reservations at a couple of large chain hotels, then I will cancel when I get my itinerary all set. I may not have needed them in the first place. Don't know, it was not very clear.

As I've posted elsewhere, I just received multi-entry 1 year visas with no more explanation than "we plan to return to China on vacation next summer!" We just wrote this one line in the area on the application for other information. It's interesting that they want every night nailed down in advance, yet they'll give such an open ended multi-entry visa with no question. On the other hand, we did include reservation confirmations to account for all the days of our initial trip, in October. BTW - I should plug the visa service that we used, a place out of DC that gave us exceptional service, with the lowest fees we could find anywhere - ChineseVisaExpress.com. They promptly answered all questions by email, and were also available by phone -- and they got the visas back to us very quickly, though we did not use express service. I'm always nervous about shipping our passports off to some strangers, but they kept in touch with us as soon as they received the documents and then the date they shipped them back.