“This is a very real frustration for South African agents. We must keep the noise loud.”
Asata CEO, Otto de Vries, was referring to the current visa situation, which, he told Travel News, was a serious situation, but just another challenge brought on by the massive growth of travel post-COVID.
De Vries said Asata had tried to intervene by writing to the countries where the problems had been the biggest – ie, those with the longest waiting times for appointments or the longest times to issue visas.
Writing as the CEO of South Africa’s only travel agents’ association, Asata, on behalf of the travel agents of South Africa, who are responsible for two million trips per year locally and abroad, De Vries emailed the embassies of the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and France, expressing Asata’s concern at the situation with visa appointment waiting and issuing times in South Africa.
There was a reply from the Dutch Ambassador himself, in which he acknowledged the problem, assured Asata that the staff of the embassy and consulate were working hard to resolve things and that more capacity was gradually being added.
But from all the others, a deafening silence.
De Vries emailed the European Commission (via the head of the EU delegation in Pretoria) three times.
No response.
Way back last November, he sent emails to the Community Relations Bureau of Consular Affairs – Passport Services at the US Department of State, as well as the Division Chief Passport Services’ Office of Community Relations at the US Department of State. No response there either. He repeated the process twice, but the silence continues.
“The problem is not just with US visas and UK visas. You cannot get an appointment with a Schengen country before October. This is a real challenge. There is a huge backlog and it seems the visa centres and visa processing departments of these countries are under-resourced.”
But De Vries said it appeared there were solutions, and the backlog could be resolved in weeks if the appointment system was improved on so that the no-show rate fell dramatically. He was referring to the Travel News article in which VFS staff had told Travel News that the massive no-show rate meant that walk-in appointments were possible.
“There are ways to deal with no-shows. This could be done by means of requiring a payment with the booking. Or use a system similar to Dineplan – a restaurant booking system that asks you to confirm a booking 24 hours beforehand, and failure to confirm means you lose the slot and it then becomes open again on the display.”
Nothing much had shifted over the past few months, he said. “We are now engaging with colleagues at travel agent associations in Brussels and across the EU, asking them to highlight to their governments the problems we are dealing with.”
Keep the noise loud. Enter your clients’ waiting times for appointments and visa-issuing times on the form here and then go here to the Visa Barometer and see which countries are are the good, the bad and the ugly.
