Flight cancellations on the rise, bookings fall as foreign embassies urge travellers to not book tickets before getting visas

Visa

Anisha Dutta (name changed to maintain anonymity) has been waiting for nearly six months for her F-1 Student Visa to join the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

She has already missed the first day of the fall semester that began on August 18 and has been given a biometrics and visa interview appointment in late August to move forward with her visa process.

“When I had applied for my student visa to the US in January, I was told I would get an appointment by February, but I was given my biometrics and visa interview appointment date only last week,” Dutta said.

Despite multiple emails and visits to the visa processing firm, she could not get an appointment and was forced to cancel her flight tickets to the US and is now planning to rebook only after she receives her visa.

“I have explained my situation to the University of Pennsylvania and they have given me until the end of September to join,” she said.

Hailing from Indore in Madhya Pradesh, Dutta has had to travel to either Delhi or Mumbai nearly three times a month since March to push for her visa approval.

Just like Dutta, there are hundreds of students in India who have been scrambling for the last few months to get their visas approved to travel to foreign countries. According to reports, the number of US visa applicants waiting for an interview slot has crossed 400,000.

The average waiting time for a visitor visa is over 500 days, i.e., almost one and half years, which means that if you apply for a visa now, the appointment date is expected by 2024.

Similarly, the Canadian visa backlog worldwide is a whopping 2.4 million, with India being one of the most affected with approximately 700,000 pending applications.

The visa processing time is six weeks for the UK, and a few Schengen countries including France and Iceland have no appointment slots available in the near term.

VFS, the technology firm that several nations have outsourced their visa processing to, is receiving 25,000 applications every day for tourist visas and has predicted high demand for student visas in August.

In the past month, diplomatic missions of the UK, Canada, the US, Germany and France, among many others, have asked the public to not commit on their tickets before getting visa approvals. This has caused a fall in bookings of international flights and a rise in flight cancellations in the last week.

“We have seen close to 1,500 flight cancellations for August, September and October,” a senior official at online travel site Yatra.com said.

He added that there has been a slowdown in new international bookings as well, but that was due to a combination of issues. Local travel agents are also feeling the stress.

“Indian passengers are cancelling tickets to not lose money on tickets and hotel confirmations,” an official at Swan Travels, a Delhi-based agency, said.

He added that tour packages have taken the biggest hit as passengers have no clarity over their visa applications.

Similarly, an official from Skylink Travels, also based in Delhi, said flight bookings to the US, UK, and Canada have fallen significantly from around 20-30 customers every month to around five.

Travel agents had even raised this issue with the government in June. The external affairs ministry had in June-end raised the issue of “streamlining student visas to Indian nationals” with countries like Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, New Zealand, Poland, the UK, and the US.

Market participants and experts have attributed the rise in visa processing time to four main factors—shortage of staff at embassies, a sudden rise in tourist visa applications, a post-pandemic surge in applications from students and working professionals, and stricter protocol around granting visas by countries.