Persons planning to apply for Swiss Schengen tourist and transit visas in the United Kingdom are ineligible to do so after, according to a report from Bleeping Computer, all appointments for these kinds of visas have been cancelled across Britain.
Switzerland’s government-chosen IT provided for easing visa applicants for citizens of third countries; TLSContact blamed an IT incident at its centre in Manchester, Edinburgh and London for appointment cancellations, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.
Residents from Britain who are citizens of countries which require a visa to travel to European countries are urged to apply through TLSContact when planning to travel to Switzerland, Belgium, France and Germany.
All these countries are part of the EU’s borderless area of Schengen, which gives persons with valid tourist or business visas access to all Schengen Zone countries.
“Due to technical reasons, this week’s visa appointments at TLScontact had to be cancelled and rescheduled. We are working together with TLScontact to fix the problems as soon as possible. TLScontact will contact all applicants for the next earliest appointment possible,” the automated response sent to BleepingComputer from the Swiss Embassy in London visas department notes.
Nationals from third countries continuously ask for help from outsourced IT and visa processing partners such as TLSContact, as well as VFS Global and BLS International.
However, during the busy summer season, the cases in which the application process does not go as it plans are not few.
Previously, a spokesperson from VFS Global said that fraudsters pretending to be employees from the visa application company are selling fake Schengen visa appointments in the United Arab Emirates.
In addition, the spokesperson said that there was marked an increase in the number of fraudsters offering to sell fake appointments this year.
“There has been an increase in fraudsters this year who are taking advantage of people by selling appointments. We have seen some people come into the centre with appointment confirmations which are fake and were unfortunately scammed by these fraudsters,” VFS Global’s Deputy Head of the UAE, Monaz Billimoria, said in this regard.
The amelioration of the epidemiological situation and the abolishment of COVID-related restrictions led to a significant increase in travel demand in EU countries.
Besides, the data provided by AirDNA previously revealed that occupancy in Europe marked a record-high surge last month, with statistics at 66 per cent, as supply remained four per cent below the pre-pandemic levels.