The French Visa Application Center has returned the need for tourists to pay an online service fee when trying to make an appointment to submit documents. Now, when choosing a slot, the applicant must make a transaction. And only after that, the place will be reserved for him.
A similar option was already introduced by the French last spring. Then the VC wanted to make life easier for ordinary tourists and reduce the number of resellers who automatically occupied all the places with bots in a matter of seconds and then sold these places to ordinary people. However, it was not possible to cope with intermediaries, rather inconveniences for tourists were added, as the site began to crash periodically.
Applicants are afraid that the booking system will start working slowly and unstable again. So far, the tourists have not found any old problems when recording. It will become clear whether the system has been finalized at the first serious load associated with the mass distribution of new slots. Representatives of visa agencies suspect that the VC has gone back to online payment due to the fact that a large number of reserved summer quotas remained unused. People signed up, but did not come and did not cancel the recordings. Having paid almost 3 thousand rubles before visiting the office, there will be much less desire not to come.
This week, the French distributed all the places for October in most of the cities of their presence. It is far from the distribution of November quotas. So far, only rare refusal slots have appeared, which both applicants and intermediaries are trying to catch manually using bots.
Earlier TourDom.ru He wrote that it took the French visa application center a month and a half to restore the online record after a technical failure.
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