My Experience Of Applying For My Chinese Visa

Not long now until April and i’m getting really excited. As it is within 3 months it was time to apply for our Chinese Visas. Due the recent changes in the application for the visas i thought it might help some of you if i talked about my experience in obtaining my visa.

The main change you may have heard about is the taking of finger prints which will mean a visit to your nearest Visa Center. Mine was Manchester.

We chose to do the visa ourselves rather than through CIBT. I had no idea what to expect. I took my time with it, followed online instructions, read everything over two or three times and found it to be fairly straight forward.  However do feel free to use CIBT if you feel you are really struggling.

As my tour is 11 days and involves several cities i need the tourism visa which is a 24 month tourist visa. The online application is about 8-9 pages long. Be prepared to sit for a while to complete this as it’s not a quick job. I did this over 2 nights. I found it best to fill everything in with cap locks on. To get past the first page you will need to have a copy of a recent passport photo uploaded on your computer as it asks you to download it for the form.

Every page you complete is saved as you continue to the next one so if you do decide to call it a night you can pick up where you left off. Once i completed this it showed me a summary of the form. I read through this again and clicked back on the pages i had made spelling mistakes on etc. Once i was happy no mistakes had been made i submitted my visa form and saved the copy it presented to me. This has to be printed off to take to the center with you. Once we submitted our visas we used the link above to make our appointment to go to the center to finish applying and supply finger prints. These appointments are Monday to Friday between 09.00-15.00 during opening hours.

The Manchester center doesn’t have any parking so we found a car park within a couple of minutes walk. There are a few options some more expensive than others. The size of the spaces in the QPark is not great.

Your appointment looks to be half an hour but i would say expect to be there for a few hours. If you can might as well make a day of it. Chinatown in Manchester seems really interesting.

We arrived at the Visa centre and joined the queue as soon as we walked through the doors. The staff are really friendly and often checked the queue for collections only etc. We had our paperwork ready to present-

• Visa application forms
• Visa appointment sheet
• Passports
• Photocopy of Passports
• Passport Photos
• Letter of invitation from the tour company
• Full itinerary of the tour

The lady checked our forms and unfortunately it hadn’t printed to fit the full A4 page. Looked to be about 75%. She pointed us to the Central library so we could reprint them. I was worried about losing our appointment but she said it was fine as they are open until 3pm. This may explain the queues if people were just turning up on the day they had booked in for. We reprinted our forms at the library at 20p a sheet. We joined the queue to try again. She checked over the forms again and put them in order for us. We were given a ticket number and took a seat. Once we were called to the desk our forms were checked over and finger prints were taken. Our paperwork did seem fine but she asked me about our flight details as my itinerary didn’t show this. I managed to show here them from my invoice on my phone but i would strongly suggest you print these out to take with you as that may not have gone to plan for us. We were asked if we would like to come back to collect the visas and passports or would we like to have them mailed to us. We chose to have them mailed back to us and paid the fee for this. This should take about 7-10 working days.

Once this was done you are given a payment reference to pay at the desk. I was relying on my credit card but they can only take debit cards or cash. I didn’t see this on the website so again be careful, make sure you have the funds for it. We used a debit card in the end.

All in all the process was fine. As long as you are prepared and have the patience it should be relatively stress free. It was a very pleasant atmosphere in the visa center and everyone was of a different age range. From this i imagined the process was straight forward enough for these too.

I do hope this may be helpful to you. I’m looking forward to sharing more details with you once I’ve actually been.