simmsc

I'm actually quite disgusted with this whole process. We first applied on 15th February and it took 22 working days to be processed and refused, 15th February to 15th March. Lots of applications were taking about 20 to 22 working days (info gained from this forum), all these applications were submitted mid February, but at the start of March, the applications are taking 3 weeks longer. I know that there were holidays for Easter and Songkran, can't see that the olympics are the cause for longer processing, how many Thai's do you know interested in athletics?

i did read some of your comments on the other forum (after you mentioned it - not posting there though) ... and I understand your frustrations! you've been to hell and back.

may i ask the reason they gave for refusing? won't be offended if you don't want to say.

Applied on 12th March...No news

That is taking a long time!

This indicates that there could be further delays ... i was already making plans for bringing my fiancee over on the 11th May 2012 ... my "hooray you're coming over on the 11th" shouting on Skype may have been premature ha ha

At the moment one way air tickets for direct flight are below 500 GBP. Maybe if we get the visa at the same time our wives can fly together!

i'm happy with that - my fiance is from Nong Khai (near Udon Thani) ... she will be getting the bus from Nong Khai to BKK airport (to avoid baggage weight issues with either Nokair or Air Asia).

i usually book EVA or Thai Airways ... you?

Applied on 12th March...No news

That is taking a long time!

This indicates that there could be further delays ... i was already making plans for bringing my fiancee over on the 11th May 2012 ... my "hooray you're coming over on the 11th" shouting on Skype may have been premature ha ha

for the settlement (fiance) visa i did about 2 years ago I used an agent ... that took about 10 weeks from memory (our moderator can probably provide the link to my old threads lol). that relationship failed because her kids (amongst other things) caused a lot of problems, which ended up causing the relationship to fail.

for this second settlement (fiance) visa that i am applying for I went it alone (without an agent). I still had all the docs that were required for the first visa requirement stored on my pc which helped me a lot (as a reminder for what supporting docs are required)... I simply provided the same docs again (updated docs of course, and ones that relate to my current relationship) plus the BULATS English test results (blue certificate).

so I'm fairly confident. the only thing that worries me is that i applied for a fiance visa about 2 years ago ... could they hold that against me? ... they may think i am not a serious individual.

but things happen in life ... the first relationship failed after my partner got here ... and since then i have met someone else who is a much better match for me.

what has also changed since then is that some registrars in the UK don't give out provisional marriage bookings anymore. i called my local registrar (same one as last time) and they told me that you can only register marriages now if both parties are present in the UK.

well ... my fiancee is in Thailand and I am here (waiting!). So I wasn't able to provide any provisional marriage bookings with this application.

time will tell .... soon by the looks of things!

> 7b7: thanks for sorting out the thread.

> retard: we had the appointment on 16th March at around 17:00 - and ended up waiting about 2 hours until our application was accepted (a whole school class was applying for visitor visas which apparently caused the delay on the day)

> tribalfusion: that's fantastic news thanks - I will definitely let you know when we hear anything. as you said, our results could be imminent ... if there aren't any further delays.

Exciting stuff!

hi retard / farmer / b basil... i just posted on the other thread.

where should we continue this conversation ... here or on the other thread?

i don't mind, as long as we all talk on the same thread as it's essentially about the same thing - visa waiting times! urggh

PS - Thanks Basil B - but i don't know how to change topic headings in forums. can you help / advise please?

I've been searching for this sort of thread for ages - but couldn't find it as the title wasn't complete.

I would suggest the following title:

UK embassy settlement visa / fiance visa processing / waiting times in Thailand / Bangkok

That should have all the keywords in it, which will drive relevant traffic in from Google for this thread.

This way we should get a little "waiting community" going again.

hi retard, we were communicating on the other thread.

me and my fiancee applied on 16th March 2012 and have not had a message from the VFS yet.

we've been waiting 7 weeks for our visa now. retard has been waiting approx 8 weeks ....

so we know that uk settlement visa processing times are at least 8 weeks ... and I'll know that ours should come through about 1 week after retard gets his results.

keeping my fingers crossed for you dude - please let me know when you get yours ... as I will then know that we've got 1 more week to go.

i guess they can do credit checks on us ... just like (for example) an insurance company or a lender could get. that's probably one way they can get a non-biased / independent view on us.

they will also be able to see our national insurance and tax records to see if we are financially stable and if we have been honest about our finances.

they will check any immigration history we have.

what they care about mainly is 1) is the relationship genuine and 2) is the sponsor able to take care of his partner financially and is the sponsor able to provide a home.

from the great thread that was run about 2 years ago i remember seeing that most settlement applications got approved. tourist visas however get declined by the truck load.

if you think about it ... the embassy needs pretty strong reasons to say "actually, you two can't get married / or live together"

i think it needs to be a blatantly obvious case of "i just want a visa and i don't intent to get married / live with my partner" for them to decline a settlement visa.

don't worry - if your application is genuine, you supplied all the relevant docs and you are reasonably financially stable ... you'll get it!

my fiancee was told by VFS (at the time of application) that the wait would be 1 month .... but I am starting to realise that the VFS is not very reliable at giving out any kind of information ... regardless of what it is. so many things they say are either wrong or conflicting. maybe the embassy is not very good at keeping them informed.

what is making me suspicious is that the visa processing times page of the embassy has not been updated for a long time ... still showing Feb 2012 processing times.

i've watched this page for a few months now (including 2 years ago too) and usually it is updated every month .... but they have not updated it for much longer than that now.

i suspect that they don't want to admit to the current visa processing time delays. just a theory.

when researching google for any kind of clues of what is going on ... i keep reading about the delays that entrants are experiencing at the borders / airports (which are currently bad/long and going to get worse as we get closer to the Olymplics) ... but they seem to be keeping very quiet about the delays in actually processing the visas.

> thaigirllondoon - question:

what does ILE mean?

when did you apply for the visa - ie how long ago?

Hi,

I submitted a UK fiance / settlement visa in Bangkok (Thailand) on 16th March 2012 and have up until today (6th May 2012) not had a result or reply.

So we have been waiting for about 7 weeks now.

I did apply for a settlement visa about 2 years ago (for a relationship that subsequently failed) and that took about 10 weeks for us to get a (positive) result.

2 years ago this forum has a great thread where everyone was posting submit dates AND result dates which gave everyone an idea of what the processing / waiting times are for settlement visa applications.

Due to the upcoming Olympic Games, it may be worth someome (who has the time) to run a "uk settlement / fiance processing / waiting times" thread again.

There could be substantial delays ... and it would probably give applicants a better idea of how long it will be until they can be together.

Waiting around (clueless) for a visa can be a pain in the neck - because you can't properly plan your life (and in my case run my business!).

Any volunteers for such a thread?

visa application granted - thanks everyone for making the wait easier. even thought it does feel like most of the time i was having a conversation with myself on here lol

You won't beleive this ... my fiancee's sister has just picked up the visa in BKK ... she called my fiance to tell her the news ... just as she was opening the envelove the line broke down and now we cant get through to her on the mobile anymore! Battery dead on the mobile it seems.

How much more dramatic can this get! We still dont know if its a yes or a no!

Morning all,

I switched on my pc this morning and on the tracking page it says the following:

Your application is ready for collection; please visit the UK Visa Application Centre where you submitted your visa application to collect the same.

The text on her phone has just come through too ...

A family member will pick up the visa today ... so I should have the result shortly.

Hi All,

Well, things have definately picked up now!

Yumster and me are up next - looks like next week.

Not sure if we should be worried or excited now - bit of both I guess.

Two questions I'd like to throw into the room

Do Fiance visas generally speaking take longer than Spouse visas (purely because a marriage is easier to prove than a pre-marriage relationship)?

How many (a rough % would be interesting to know) settlement visa applicants (Fiance and Spouse) actually get asked to go for an interview?

I haven't seen 'interviews' mentioned much in this forum so my guess is the % is fairly low.

That should give us something to talk about over the weekend!

Congrats to both of you (Brotch and Pagan1).

Meanwhile, I've arrived back in the UK ... after 1 month of complaining about the heat in Thailand ... I've now got a bad cold due to the extreme climate change (ie coming back to the cold weather) ... serves me right!

Now I wish I was back out there with my beautiful fiancee!

3 to go before we get a decision now (yumster, liveforever and silverdales) ... I really wish you all the best of luck!

Best of luck pagan1 - just a couple of weeks to go for us now :-)

That follows, and pagan1's waiting time tells us that processing times haven't gotten any shorter yet.

After pagan1 gets a decision you and me should only have a 2 week wait though.

Encouraging to see a lot of 'successful' results in the list above - thats definately cheered me up.

Even though I am flying back to the UK alone today ... sniff sniff.

Silverdales,

We have not recieved a 'confirmation of payment' letter from the embassy, but will let you know when and if we do.

Ours should just be shortly after yours.

What this does show though is that they don't actually spend a very long time reviewing a single application.

It's just the queue that makes the wait so long - not the actual work they have to do on each application.

My flight is at 1am in the morning ... and I'm still hoping that we might get that text telling us that the docs are ready ...

Chances of this happening seem very very low though as there are too many ahead of us in the queue.

I'm not giving up the hope though :-)

We were hoping the same!

You'll be an important guide for us ... as we should get a decision literally a few days after you.

What a wait its been - I've stuck it out here for as long as possible ... but gotta go back to the UK.

Fingers crossed for both of us :-)

Hi All,

I've added myself to the list below (bold).

I've been waiting with my Fiancee in Thailand for 1 month ... can't wait any longer ... the business is calling me back. Flying back tomorrow.

We are both staring at the 'Mercury' entry on the list ... and getting concerned that the wait is getting a lot longer. Any one have any updates on Mercury?

What did give us a shock is when the embassy (August statistics) changed the processing times from 67% (in 30 days) to 12% (in 30 days).

This is quite a big change ...

Waiting times from applications that have completed.

26 Feb, 08 Apr, 5 weeks and 6 days, weaver93, successful

03 Mar, 22 Apr, 7 weeks and 1 day, kp86, successful

04 Mar, 26 Apr, 7 weeks and 4 days, rinbury, unknown

08 Mar, 04 May, 8 weeks and 1 day, lostforwords, successful

08 Mar, 05 May, 8 weeks and 2 days, harrydash, successful

10 Mar, 06 May, 8 weeks and 1 day, samuzza, successful

19 Mar, 12 May, 7 weeks and 5 days, , refused

26 Mar, 25 May, 8 weeks and 4 days, andyandythai, unknown

30 Mar, 27 May, 8 weeks and 2 days, HowardJohnson, successful

30 Mar, 03 Jun, 9 weeks and 2 days, , refused

30 Apr, 04 May, 0 weeks and 4 days, bwalker1973, successful

07 May, 29 Jun, 7 weeks and 4 days, craiggm16, successful

11 May, 02 Jul, 7 weeks and 3 days, Phil_nu_uk and nongbkk, both successful

24 May, 09 Jul, 6 weeks and 4 days, friend of catch245uk, unknown

25 May, 12 Jul, 6 weeks and 6 days, candledinner79, successful

25 May, 15 Jul, 7 weeks and 2 days, sanook2me, successful

26 May, 16 Jul, 7 weeks and 2 days, catch245UK, successful

31 May, 21 Jul, 7 weeks and 2 days, Matty1243, successful

01 Jun, 23 Jul, 7 weeks and 3 days, billymalky and esoteric, both successful

02 Jun, 02 Aug, 8 weeks and 5 days, Kaks and mikeee, both successful

04 Jun, 18 Aug, 10 weeks and 5 days, snuggzzz, successful

08 Jun, 06 Aug, 8 weeks and 3 days, kevozman1, successful

09 Jun, 09 Aug, 8 weeks and 5 days, snakey, successful

11 Jun, 11 Aug, 8 weeks and 5 days, tigerjohn, successful

18 Jun, 25 Aug, 9 weeks and 5 days, Dubar, successful

21 Jun, 03 Sep, 10 weeks and 4 days, incy, successful

25 Jun, 03 Sep, 10 weeks and 0 days, stament, successful

24 Jun, 07 Sep, 10 weeks and 5 days, chiang mai, successful

24 Jun, 17 Sep, 12 weeks and 1 day, jasonr3225, successful

25 Jun, 15 Sep, 11 weeks and 5 days, akaloco, unknown

28 Jun, 16 Sep, 11 weeks and 3 days, skeets, successful

28 Jun, 17 Sep, 11 weeks and 4 days, TiggerFish, successful

06 Jul, 22 Sep, 11 weeks and 1 day, lonnie41, successful

Still waiting (04/10/10)

06 Jul, Mercury, has been waiting for 12 weeks and 6 days to date

20 Jul, pagan1, has been waiting for 10 weeks and 6 days to date

23 Jul, yumster, has been waiting for 10 weeks and 3 days to date

30 Jul, liveforever, has been waiting 9 weeks and 3 days to date

03 Aug, silverdales, has been waiting 8 weeks and 6 days to date

06 Aug, simmsc, has been waiting for 8 weeks and 3 days to date

17 Aug, sonicdragon, has been waiting 6 weeks and 6 days to date

20 Aug, Diddyman, has been waiting 6 weeks and 3 days to date

01 Sep, Quan, has been waiting 4 weeks and 5 days to date

14 Sep, Stanaris, has been waiting 2 weeks and 6 days to date