I Need Good General Advice For Gaining A Uk Visitor Visa For My Thai Girlfriend

[misterphil]

Hi Simon,

You dont need to purchase the tickets, just make a reservation. We get ours from a travel agents in Pattaya on Soi 3, they are 100 baht and shows her name, dates and flight details.

As for not having money in her account, she needs it. If she goes for an interview for the visa and she is asked "what will you do if you have a problem with your boyfriend in the UK and you want to go home?" What will she say? If she has the cash in her account and she can prove it she can say at the interview that she would contact her embassy and ask for assistance home. Remember you have to cover all the bases and these questions do get asked at interviews.

If you dont have reciepts for the places that you stayed when you went to Lao with her but do have the same visa stamps in your passports say this in your cover letter. If you have any photos of you and her with her family include these in the application.

Look at it as the entry clearence officer would, you say you met your g/f last year and you went to Lao and Cam. with her. He will want to see evidence of this and you can proove it by showing them the same visa stamps at the same time and the photos of you both in Lao and Cam.

If you say you met your g/f in Thailand last year they will want to know where, in a bar? in a restaurant? in a bus stop? in a shopping mall? everything has to be covered.

If you say that she is going to the UK for 3 months and you both decide to stay a bit longer thats fine, she will more than likely get a 6 month tourist visa if its granted and she is entitled to stay as long as the visa is valid.

Remember allthough you are helping your g/f apply for the visa it is actualy her that is applying for it and she needs to make it look as good as possible, and has to make the application look as if she really wants to go to the UK.

Dont forget to cover all the bases, if you tell the entry clearence officer something about your relationship then you need the evidence to back it up.

Chok Dee (good luck)

Hi guys.

Thanks a lot for your replies. I think I'm feeling even more nervous about my g/f getting her visa now than before. Not because there's any good reason she might be refused, but because there seems to be even more evidence/documentation to provide than I previously realised, and hence more opportunity to make mistakes.

A general question about the length of the visit. As I understand it the length of a tourist visa is 6 months? The plan for the visit is to spend some time sightseeing, but also to spend some time living normal life. Obviously she can't work on a tourist visa, so by normal life I mean I go to work, she stays at home entertaining herself and preparing delicious Isaan food for me. We need some time like this so she can see how she gets on with England and find out if she can settle here at some point in the future. I don't think it would be a good idea to say all that on the tourist visa application. I'm thinking I should state that she is coming over here for a couple of months just for holiday, sightseeing and meeting friends/family. She could then stay longer than that up to the length of the visa. Does this sound like a particularly good/bad idea? Any obvious problems with this approach that I may have missed?

Regarding flights/reservations. On the visa application my g/f will state her intended date of travel. I'm reluctant to spend money on a flight until the visa has been granted just in case it's refused or delayed due to the extra cost of changing dates on tickets. Is providing the intended flight numbers and dates adequate, or should I just bite the bullet and buy the tickets?

My g/f has family and a job to return to after her visit. Are there any other reasons she should state? What's the best way of phrasing this on the application?

Does my g/f actually need 40K baht sitting idle in her account? She has more than that passing through her account each month with her salary and the support I send to her.

7by7 - I've got all the necessary bank statements, payslips and mortgage documents together thanks. No emails though as my g/f's not online. I will tell the truth (with the possible exception of length of stay) and not attempt to make the application look better than it is.

Misterphil - I met my girl at the beginning of a month long stay in Thailand last year and then visited her again for two and a half weeks in April/may this year. While we spent all that time together I don't have receipts for anything we did together. We spent time in Laos and Cambodia, travelling by coach and staying in hotels arranged by a travel agent, but I paid in cash and didn't keep the receipt. We flew to Isaan on my last trip to visit her parents, but I paid for the flights in cash. Both times we stayed in Bangkok I paid for the hotels by cash and didn't have any reservations. Is the embassy likely to find this lack of evidence suspicious? We do both have the appropriate stamps in our passports for travelling to Laos and Cambodia, and the dates match on those showing we travelled together.

Apologies if it looks to you experienced guys that I'm getting myself hung up on details here. I just want to do my best to make sure everything goes smoothly, we'd both be really upset if she can't come to stay with me.

Thanks,

Simon.

[trevorg]

Hi Simon

Just to give you a bit more confidence, my girlfriend Pom and I were in a very similar situation to you this time last year when she applied for a 6 month visitor visa except she did not have a job, but does own her own house. I was in the UK at the time and helped her with her application and all the documentation and wrote a fairly detailed sponsor letter including photos of us together etc. She was granted the visa within 1 week and came to stay with me for the full 6 months.

I 'emigrated' to Thailand in April of this year (on a Non Imm B visa) but need to go back to the UK for 3-4 weeks on 4th July and wanted Pom to accompany me. As the process was so quick last year we left it until 8th June to do an on-line application in order to get a scheduled appointment, and to our shock we could not get an appointment for 2 1/2 weeks and they were quoting 2- 4 weeks processing time. Anyway we bit the bullet and took all the documentation to VFS on Monday 15th June (very early 7.15am) without an appointment, we were still about 15th in the queue. Pom was inside for about an hour.

The good news is she got her SMS on Wednesday 24th (9 days processing time) and picked up her passport (with succesful visa) yesterday!

Of course, it will have helped that she had a previous visa last year and stayed within the conditions of that visa (not working and not overstaying etc) this time, but I thought that some 'positive' news may alay some of your worries.