Fodorites: BRITISH VISA QUESTION AGAIN!! got to apply for VISA before March 10th ....also any rec for TRAVEL AGENTS ??
 

Hi,
we will be visiting Britain in May before starting our ITALY/France vacation and we are US permanent residents but not citizens. So we will have to apply for British VISA.

one of the requirements says that

"YOU need to have CONFIRMED flight reservation ( you may be reserve flights but do not purchase the tickets before the VISA is issued)"

So to apply for VISA we need to have our flight reservations/itinerary along with other required documents.


If we buy a non refundable ticket, then we might loose almost $400 per person ( for change of date or not travelling) if we dont get the VISA. If we decide to buy refundable ticket then it costs $6000 per person and we dont know if we can cancel this after we get the VISA , so we can buy the 10 times cheapter non-refundable tickets after getting visa.

So we need your help here. Has anyone have just US Green card applied for British VISA? what did you do for flight booking/reservation?

we were thinking of going through a travel agent and holding reservation for a flight for few days and getting a flight reservation/itinerary from the Travel agents for applying for VISA. That way we will not be paying anything until we get to know the result of our VISA applicatoin. if VISA is given, we can still go and buy non refundable tickets or go with TA and buy the reserved ticket, if not we can cancel the reservation.

So cany anyone recommend a GOOD TRAVEL AGENT IN US that we can contact?

Any help will be really appreciated. We need to get thsi done before Firday March 10th. So Please give some suggestions on Travel agent or if you have applied for BRITISH VISA before, can you tell us what you did??


Thanks

Just wanted to let you know that we are not going to use travel agent to plan and book everything for our trip. we have already read thousands and FODOR message/threads and we have booked hotels and come up with our own itinerary for our ITALY/FRANCE vacation. we are visiting family in london and need travel agent only to reserve round trip tickets from US-LONDON and back.

I am little confused,

you say you are US permanent residents but not citizens,

so from that statement I gather you do not hold a US passport,

so which country are you citizens of?
Can't you use this country's passport to travel?

yes we are not US citizens. We hold foreign ( indian ) passport. we can travel with this passport to UK for sure but we need to apply for a VISA unlike US citizens.

Yes we can trave to SWISS if we want to with just a US green card but not to UK

Sorry for not being clear earlier..hope you can help me answer my questions now !!

Why do you need a travel agent to reserve an airline ticket? All you need to do is <b>phone</b> the airline you intend on using (BA, Virgin etc.) and make a reservation. They will generally hold the reservation for a certain amount of time before you have to purchase it or lose the price. If they won't hold the ticket long enough, ask them for some advice.

You seem concerned about cancelling your tickets if your Visa application gets refused. Is there any reason you'd get refused? Or am I reading it wrong?

I think that I've already offered my opinions in this thread:

http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=34764564

Just make a reservation and print out the itinerary and confirmation. It should be sufficient for the consulate, but you should check with the consulate to be sure.

There's really no need to buy tickets ahead of time as far as I know.

No one but the consulate can guarantee you that your visas will not be denied.

As I mentioned, the airline will usually hold a courtesy reservation for 24h. I'd simply call the airline and have them e-mail/fax me an itinerary and then take it to the consulate.

But then, as I said, only the consulate can tell you what the requirements are.

I doubt that the consulate will hold you responsible to that itinerary you presented. They get so many visa applications a day -- do you think that they will call each airline and travel agent to check to see that the itinerary was actually followed through?

I have absolutely no reason why Embassy would deny our visa. I just wanted to take the right precautions in case something goes wrong..( delay in processing etc) as I need british visa before I can apply for schengen and I need british visa before March end so I can apply for schengen before April 1st week ( Italian embassy is where we are applying for schegen as we are going to stay in Italy for long time and Italian embassy has a policy that we have to apply 30 days before actual departure date and we are leaving in 2nd week of May.!!

111op thanks for your advice, we will do that...

Good luck.

I think that taking precautions is good. For that reason, I'd not buy a nonrefundable ticket unless I'm betting that fares will rise a lot afterwards. As I said, a confirmed reservation (e-mail/fax) should be acceptable.

By the way, of some of the Schengen countries (Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Holland), France may be the easiest to deal with. They used to give visas out on the same day.

If you read between the lines in the advice I gave you, you'll realize that there're all sorts of &quot;tricks&quot; you can use. In particular, you don't really need to get your British visa before your Schengen visa, even if you're planning to visit the UK first. I'll leave this open for your interpretation.

But then of course, as I said, the consulate has the final say.

Where are you applying for the visas? Whereever it is, make sure that you get there early. There could be a quota for applications for each day.

111op: I have posted recent message on this thread that should answer most of your question!!

http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=34764564

just like you said, the british offical I spoke with told me that I should have schengen visa first before applying for british visa as we will be visiting ITALY and then france after london.

I believe british consulate wants to know if we have visa for our final destination or now. So they need to see our schengen visa.

we are applying for schengen at ITALIAN embassy as we will be staying in italy longer and its also our first port of entry into schenge narea.

we now need to find out if italian embassy is ok with us not having birtish visa as we will be coming to rome from London?? any idea???

I am unable to reach italian embassy visa offical as they recieve calls only on two days monday and firday between 1 - 3.30 pm Pacific. ( yep, calling SFO consulate)..

hope to get to talk to them after 1 today as it happens to be thursday here :)

I am US permanent resident and I received my UK visa yesterday. I think I might be repeating myself, but I assure you that you dont need to buy tickets before applying for their visa. Just show them printed out itinenary with hotel address etc. The application can only be done online BTW.

Ivan: Thanks for taking time tive me an update.

did it take around 1 week to get UK visa?

yes I now know we dont need to book flight tickets and only need to make a flight reservation and submit an itinerary that the airline sends to us to Biritish consluate. we are staying with family so we have an invitation letter.

yes we know about online application and thinking that we will be sending out documents today/tomorrow we already filled online application yesterday night !!

now we will have to make a flight reservation showing US - UK - US ( 5 days) and send it to consulate to get the visa.

btw the visa is issued for 90 days right?? they dont care if you change the length of your stay in UK from 5 to 10 as long as its within the validity period/expiry date??

Visa is issued for 6 months I believe, you may travel within this period as many times as you want and I don't think the length of a trip is restricted. It takes 5 business days to process the visa, plus fedex shipment times, so it comes down to around a week, they were on the ball in my case. Good luck!