How to lose friends and leave families stranded: The UK’s visa experience

My own family has lived this lesson. Our hope was to travel to England this summer to be with family for the birth of a nephew – and also, for the sake of our mental health, to spend some time walking in its famed countryside.

Sadly, to do so, we’ve had to contend with the UK government’s bizarre travel traffic light system. And there’s also the issue of visas; my wife is from the Gulf and needs a visa to enter the country.

We’d began preparations early, and that included vaccinations. Our hope was to spend time in Bahrain, which until recently was an amber-list country, and then fly on to London. We’d quarantine at home and follow all the required testing.

What we hadn’t counted on was the UK government’s visa policies, both written and unwritten. With months to spare, my partner put in her papers to the UK’s visa service provider, VFS, and the UK Visas and Immigration agency. And then we waited. And waited. A month passed by, and there was still no word. We began to worry; what was happening for a process which usually takes 15 days? Emails were sent and phone calls were made to the UK Visas and Immigration agency – both of which are chargeable services – and the answer was invariably “we’re checking on the issue.”

On hold

A month and a half in, I reached out to UK embassy contacts in the UAE and discovered the problem. We may be travelling from Bahrain, but my wife had applied from the UAE, a country that is on the UK’s red list. And the UK isn’t processing any visas on the red list. For some reason which I’m unable to fathom, we weren’t told this prior to our application. And it seems no one responding to us from the UK Visas and Immigration agency had bothered to mention this either. In contrast, my wife’s family in Bahrain had applied and received their visa in the standard 15 working days’ timeframe.

For a country that’s gone through Brexit, and is now reaching out to the world, I’m disappointed at how poor its response has been to those wishing to travel. First, we’ve had the red list debacle, which has severely limited travel from the Gulf. And now the lack of clarity and communication around visas. In the year ending September 2019, over 2.7 million visa applications had been made globally. I can only wonder at how many people have applied for a UK visa in the UAE and not been told that their application won’t be processed until the country has been moved off the red list.

Unlike our friends in Europe, who are not even accepting visa applications, it leaves the impression that someone is happy to take the (not inconsiderable) application money and sit on it – which I very much hope I am mistaken about. And if you’re looking for help on understanding what is happening, expect to pay further at premium rates (only the UK Visas and Immigration agency is able to field questions, and not VFS which is involved in the applications).

So, we’ve now had to pull my wife’s visa application. Without knowing when the UAE would come off the red list, it simply didn’t make sense to continue. We’d have never even put in the application if we’d have known the outcome. And as for asking for a refund? “We’re not able to see what’s happening to payments, but you should get a refund after 28 days,” the contact center person told me. This was advice for which I’d paid AED50.

If the UK Visas and Immigration agency can teach us anything right now, it’s how to lose friends and leave families stranded, all while making good revenues. I cannot speak for others, but I promise you that our next trip will be visa-free. And you can probably guess where we won’t be travelling.

Alex Malouf, communications professional and the only Chartered Communicator, Chartered Marketer, and Senior Communication Management Professional in the Middle East.