Amit’s e-world

I am reading The Undercover Economist since last week & already I can see its practices in almost everything around me. The author claims scarcity defines bargaining power & there couldn’t be a better example of this when you visit an embassy – for me the experience came from visiting the Belgium one.

There aren’t too many routes to get a visa for another country. Probably, 4 or 5 application centres in the country and in truth only one that you can really visit because of its proximity. On Monday morning, I was stuck in a queue outside the Belgium visa application centre (VAC) in London for over 2 hours. This, despite reaching the VAC 25 minutes before it officially opens. There were about 30 applicants ahead of me and as time passed, there were an equal number of people behind me. The guard was letting people in one by one, so the rest had to be outside without any seating facilities for the elderly and in vicinity of a building under construction, where workers were constantly excusing us in the queue to get their equipments into and out of the site.

After two and a half hours, when my turn did come finally, I entered into heaven – 100 red seats lying empty allowing me to choose where to sit – a complete oxymoron to the long queues outside. Finally, everything was processed, albeit with minor hiccups. I was asked to collect the visa in person after two days. I reached the visa office again after two days, to find almost every other person who went to the collection desk abusing the VFS officials. There was this guy who moaned about getting a one-day visa for £73, and the other who was refused a visa apparently because his flight tickets were fully flexible & not “non-refundable”. There was a lady who made her third visit in the last week, after being constantly wrongly advised about when she could collect her passport, and another pregnant lady who was cursing the VFS official that he would never have children, because she was being made to wait for a long stretch of time. I had my share of bad experience too, to see my visa being a 3 month one, when I had requested for a year. This, despite having made an unblemished visit to another Schengen state last year on a single entry visa.

From the business perspective, I suspect it works like this. The Belgium embassy is pretty strict at granting visas. So they have outsourced the customer facing operations to VFS, who specialise more in handling customer abuses than provide customer service. While the Schengen visa typically costs £50, VFS charge an additional £25 over this as service charge. VFS knows no more about the application than we do. They can’t handle queries independently. Every applicant is advised to contact Embassy (in writing) for any complaint. Nobody from the embassy is represented at the application centre, just to avoid any backlashes. Being a customer, I think it is pretty appalling, but I reminded of what people who apply for an Indian visa also face. They need to get into queues as early as 6 in the morning. Stand in long queues.. there is a youtube video on the queue outside the Indian embassy at London, posted by a visa processing agency.

Quite clearly, the law of economics works against us (consumers / customers). There is no incentive for embassies to provide better customer service, as their consumers have no alternatives. It is very unlikely that someone will make “treating the embassy a lesson for its misdeeds” a cause of their life. More applicants need visas than embassies want to allow into their borders. It is high time governments stepped in to provide a regulatory body to manage this mistreatment. Perhaps on a quid-pro-quo basis i.e. My embassy in your country will be as professionally managed as your embassy in my country. Of course, consumers also can do something about it using their collective power that can be easily harnessed in the Web 2.0 world. Share your experience, tips & loopholes openly on public forums / blogs & make it difficult for the embassies to maintain double standards & keep rules hidden.