Problems Getting Spanish Toursit Visa For Girlfriend

[yachtmasterjohn]

I'm an Irish national, UK domiciled, Spanish resident.

I'm trying to get a 60 day tourist visa for my Thai girlfriend to visit me in Mallorca where I own a property and have lived for 5 years.

I'm told that before she can go for her interview with the Spanish Embassy in BKK we need to produce a "Carta de Invitacion" issued by the police here in Spain, in addition to return air tickets, photos of us together, copies of our emails, travel insurance, copies of my property deeds, copies of bank statements and a letter from me inviting her and promising to pay all her expenses.

The police in Spain, require copies of my girlfriends passport and proof of her address in Chiang Mai, authorised by the Spanish embassy in BKK, and say it will take 3-4 weeks to process the Carta de Invitacion.

This means my girlfriend would have to travel from Chiang Mai to BKK to get her documents authorised, send them to me in Spain, wait 4 weeks for the Carta to be issueda nd another week for me to post it to Thailand, then visit the embassy in BKK again for her Schengen Visa interview and then wait another 3/4 weeks for a visa to be issued.

Does anybody know if it's possible to short circuit this terrible double dose of red tape ?

Is a Carta de Invitacion strictly required ? Is there any way around getting her passport & address documents authorised in BKK ?

Any advice members can give us would be very mch appriciated as once again the Spanish system is driving me crazy.

John

[kawaiimomo]

Hi there John,

I'm from Barcelona and obtained a tourist visa for an ex-.gf about 4 years ago. You can avoid all this time and patience consuming process, you can obtain an invitation letter just by going to a "notario", he can notarise the letter assuring you are the one inviting your thai national. In my previous case all I had to do is to bring a scan of her passport, they already had templates for this kind of letters, this is done on the day; your only problem must be making a soon appointment because these "notarios" are always busy and being in Mallorca won't help either.

Once you got the letter, send it via courier and then your gf can go to the embassy to be interviewed and present the letter, round trip plane ticket and bank account document. Be advised that the questions in the interview can turn very personal as they act like if they were interrogating a suspect, as I was told. In my case they also demand her to have at least 2,000 euros in her bank account (if you trust her you can just transfer the money to their account and then she returns it to you, they are not checking this).

I never thought her visa wouldn't be approved since she only was about to stay around 5 days here. But now I'm in a relationship with another thai national and we are going to ask for a 30 or 60 days visa for next month, so I would appreciate if you can share your experience here too. I'm kinda afraig about the embassy denying visa after buying plane ticket. What to do in that case?

Regards and good luck,

Victor

[BIGJIMMY]

I'm a Brit living in Thailand. The wife has a UK visit visa and we head back to the UK every summer, my parents own an apartment in Tenerife and we (for the last two years) have had a holiday there, we get the wifes visa from the Spanish Embassy in Bangkok, we have an ongoing visa folder which I update each time a new visa is applied for and we submit that along with a copy of the deeds of the Spanish apartment, a letter of invitaion from my Mum for us to stay there, holiday insurance for the whole time we're there (via an agent in town, BUPA about 1200 baht for a week), then the actual plane tickets once she gets the visa, we've done this twice for Spain without issue and once for Portugal, we'll be doing it again next month, we're going to be applying for a 30 day multiple entry as after Tenerife we're heading to Italy and France and as Spain is our first destination thats the country the visa has to be apllied for, I hope it isn't a problem this time.

Best of luck to you.

Jimmy

[ThaiVisaExpress]

We process these applications guidance is on the Embassy web site.