Schengen visa question: Tourist visa, visa to visit friends and family or business visa?
Dear Editor/Rob V.,
I live about three hours from Bangkok with my girlfriend, so I'm looking for help to try to avoid having to make multiple trips to Bangkok when one trip should be possible.
I would like to take my girlfriend to the Netherlands and Belgium to visit family and friends. She is quite well traveled in Asia, but she has not yet been to a Schengen country. The website of the Dutch embassy mentions 3 visa forms:
- Tourist visa
- Visa to visit friends and family
- Business visa
She works here in Thailand for a German company that will probably cooperate with documentation required for a business visa, but this German company has no branch in the Netherlands and Belgium. Whether this can be an obstacle for applying for a business visa is not clear to me.
A visa to visit friends and family also seems rather cumbersome to me. If I understand correctly, certainties must be provided. I don't know if that is a lot of work but I would like to get some practical experience based information on this.
A tourist visa seems the simplest at first sight, but is that really the case?
As additional information I can share the following with the readers:
I am Dutch and have been living and working in Thailand for 9 years now. Of these, 7 years with a stevedoring company founded with a Thai business partner that is also involved in shipping agencies. My other half is a safety officer at a German company and has no interest in settling outside Thailand. The trip would be for 8 to 10 days, preferably late September – early October
Thanks in advance!
Regards,
Hans
Dear Hans,
You must always be honest with a visa application, if a lie is revealed at the best (or outright fraud) then you will lose all your credibility with a (next) application. So if you are mainly going to visit friends/family (and they will give you accommodation), then she will apply under the travel purpose 'visit family/friends', if you are going to stay in hotels and travel around the Benelux, then the purpose is ' tourism'. If your girlfriend really has to go to Europe for business, she could choose the goal 'business', of course she can take a holiday there if she is there anyway. However, I get the impression that you are concerned about a rejection and therefore choose the 'better' destination. But just be open and honest with the embassy/BuZa and in most cases the applicant will simply receive the visa.
If your girlfriend encloses a copy of her passport(s) with proof of travel to other countries with her application, this already shows that she is a reliable traveler without any nefarious plans (overstay, illegality, etc.). If she also shows a bond with Thailand through her job, which she has to and wants to return to on time, that is also good evidence to show that a visa can be granted without any worries.
Briefly outlined your story, it seems to me that it is no problem to obtain a visa. You are too late if you want to leave in less than a month. Making an appointment at the embassy (or possibly with optional external service provider VFS Global) can already take 2 weeks, the treatment itself usually takes a week, but can also take 2 weeks if it is busy. Then you are already a month further. Hence my advice to start the application at least a month in advance and preferably even earlier.
And yes, everything should suffice with 1 visit to the embassy or the VFS office in Bangkok, you do not necessarily have to collect the passport, but you can have it returned by registered mail at an additional cost. You will only know the result once the passport is back in your hands.
For further hints and tips I advise you to download the PDF here on Thailandblog under the heading 'Schengen visa'. This file can be downloaded and read or printed and contains the necessary suggestions and question & answer points. Hopefully that information plus the current instructions from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will give you all the information you need to apply for the visa without any setbacks. But if you still have specific questions, let me know.
Success!
Rob V
Resources and more:
www.thailandblog.nl/visum-short-stay/dossier-schengenvisum-2019/