The Application process for these visas was not that easy or straightforward, but yesterday, we finally received our Passports back with our new China Visas glued to one of the Visa pages inside the passport. I will say that in the past several days, we had some fleeting doubts about the company we were using for these visas.
There were some last-minute problems with the application, and this was only brought up to us when our applications had been delivered to the person who was the contact for China Visa Solutions in Washington, DC, the location of the China Embassy, which we were required to use to obtain our visas since we live in South Carolina. If you recall, the home base of China Visa Solutions is in Chicago, the location of one of the China Consulates in the USA. However, we could not use that consulate, as previously mentioned, so our applications had to be sent to Washington DC.
The contact there had reviewed the applications when he received them, and he had an issue with the fact that we had listed Lhasa as one of our destinations, which it is. Lhasa is in Tibet, and there is a special permit required to visit any destination in Tibet, separate from the China Visa. The person in Washington thought this could cause a problem with obtaining our visas, and the recommendation was to remove Lhasa from the itinerary. There had been some previous email exchanges between Shawn and myself over what was also some misleading information on the Viking Itinerary for this part of the trip.
Shawn, our original contact and manager at China Visa Solutions had thought we were staying in the “Lhasa Hotel” in Chengdu, the city we visit before Lhasa. I had clarified this with him and sent a copy of the map of the itinerary clearly showing our stop in Lhasa, and thought that was no longer an issue. Nothing had been said about not showing Lhasa as a destination on the original application, and that was how it had been submitted. I was disappointed that this had not been caught before the application was officially submitted, and now, it would require completely re-submitting a entirely different application to fix that since once submitted, the application can not be modified. I was not happy.
The “plan” was for me to complete another online application for both of us and then print it out as a PDF file and email it to Shawn. I was not sure how this was going to work since we would not be sending another signed copy. Somehow, we were under the impression the contact in Washington was going to get us to sign it digitally, or that was what I thought the plan was. I offered to do another FedEx shipment with the revised and re-signed applications. That seemed the most prudent approach. I was not sure how all of this was going to work. I also wanted some confirmation that the Itinerary we now showed was good, so I did not want to submit the second application until I had someone tell me at China Visa Solutions that it was acceptable. I did not want to have to fill it all out again, it is tedious. I did ask why it was such an issue to put Lhasa on the itinerary since you can’t get a permit to visit Tibet without also having a visa to visit China, but I never got a good answer, only that there was concern it might cause the visa application to be denied. I also knew that specific itinerary information was not supposed to matter any longer under the new streamlined visa rules China had implemented on January 1, 2024, but since these rules were new, maybe no one was sure how it might impact the visa approval
In the end, we just sent the new application ID’s and our passport numbers, which they already had since they already had our passports, via email to Shawn. This would allow them to revise the applications if needed since they were not yet officially submitted and also allow them to be printed out directly. I had offered to actually “submit” them on the China website since there were some acknowledgments that we had to certify as part of the submittal. I never got a response back.
A few days passed and we never received any feedback on how the revised applications looked. I sent an email to Shawn requesting a status update, and the reply was that the visas should be ready the next day, which was Friday, March 29. I still do not know how the revised applications were being used, or how the signatures were updated, so I was getting a little bit leery about our visas. I did some research online to see if we could verify the visas once we received them to make sure they were valid, and not fakes. Unfortunately, there is not anywhere I could find to accomplish the verification. Some countries do have an online verification, but I could not find anything for China online.
The visas we received yesterday look authentic and match what you see online in images that people have posted of their visas with their info redacted. I was a little surprised that there was no picture on the visa itself since we had submitted both online pictures with the application and had sent off physical pictures with the paper application, but I now saw from online images that there is no picture on the visa itself, they must be part of the file/documentation.
In the end, we are not sure what happened. My guess is that they took the revised itinerary page and somehow placed the application number barcode from the original application onto the top of that revised page, replacing the revised application barcode number. That was the only page that did not match, and the barcode was the only identifier on that particular page that referenced the revised application ID. Each page of the application has a barcode on it at the top. It would not be hard to do with software such as Adobe Acrobat Pro.
In the end, there is still a little uncertainty, but the company, China Visa Solutions, has been in business for several years and has many positive reviews and even had a news outlet shoot a video about them that was done about a year ago when travel to China resumed after COVID and many people needed to obtain visas. We did see later from the information listed on the Viking website that the instructions for applying for the visa through GenVisa, the Viking recommended company, that GenVisa even instructed applicants not to put any Tibet locations on the visa itinerary because of the secondary permit required to enter Tibet. Lhasa is in Tibet, so our company was correct in telling us later that we needed to revise the application to remove Lhasa from our listed itinerary, so that bodes well for them being totally legit, no one faking anything would go through the trouble to make us change that.
Now that we have the visas, we discussed what we needed to accomplish in getting information for this trip to make the final decision at the end of April when we need to make the final payment. It will be a large sum of money, so we need to make sure we are comfortable with going and understand what the details of the trip will be.
We are still not sure of exactly what excursions are included for both the land portion and the cruise portion of the trip. I will be contacting Viking to see if there is a listing of excursions, which we did not receive when we made the initial deposit.
Leave a Reply