Foreign Perspectives

As we edge into the Autumn, it’s the season for receiving reservations made for the sole aim of getting a Schengen visa.

They’re easy to spot. They’re made by South Africans and Chinese, are for 10 to 20 days at a time and don’t reply to our confirmation e-mail that gives information about the region.

A lot of people think that this doesn’t cost us any money. Not so. We had a 20 day booking in July which resulted in us rejecting a number of other bookings yet it was cancelled just a couple of days before they were due to arrive. Net effect was that we lost several hundred euros of bookings.

Since we’re quite small, it doesn’t take a whole lot of such bookings to “fill” us up. In fact, we’d have been virtually full this coming weekend courtesy of three such bookings yet two have already cancelled and we’re not too confident about the third.

So, what we started doing a few weeks back was to offer these people two options: 1) we charge them the full balance immediately and it’s not refundable and 2) we cancel the booking and inform the authorities. The first cancellation has just arrived. She was none too pleased that we’d billed her several hundred euros yet we gave her the option of paying or cancelling nearly three weeks ago and, as expected, received no response. After all, if she let us cancel her booking and inform the authorities she’d not have gotten her visa, would have been tagged as someone who makes fraudulent visa applications and may it may have affected her right of residence in the UK.