Hotel Reservation Needs to meet certain standards For Schengen Visa

The hotel reservation needs to meet certain standards, regardless of the type of visa you wish to apply for:

1- Hotel reservation must be valid

For any application, the embassy expects your hotel to remain valid all through the period of your visa application. For many embassies, it takes 15 work days or three weeks to process application. For others, it takes two months or more (Canada embassy for example). Therefore, your hotel reservation must remain active for a long period of time to accommodate the embassy schedule for document verification.

2- Hotel reservation must be verifiable

Hotelreservation cannot be an ordinary dummy hotel booking online. By ordinary dummy hotel booking for U.K visa, dummy hotel booking for Canada visa or for any visa at that, this means a fake reservation which some get through fake hotel booking confirmation generators online. If you truly need your visa, you would not risk doing this.

The truth is: embassies will always contact hotels to verify that the hotel reservation is valid as at the time of document verification.

3- Hotel reservation can be directly from hotel

You can choose to book hotel directly from the hotel website but you must be ready to tackle some challenges. Here are the following challenges to consider:

a- Cancellation before the date on booking policy

Because the booking platform is designed to test the credibility of the debit card or the availability of funds on the card, it is likely for the reservation to cancel before the cancellation date on the booking policy. Some hotels attempt to charge one dollar or two, and once payment does not go through at the time, they cancel your reservation.

Do not forget that this sometimes happen after you have submitted your hotel reservation document to the embassy. And it carries a booking confirmation ID for verification. So, making another reservation to same hotel may not remedy the situation.

b- Undue debits/loss of money

As stated before, some hotels could debit your card before the date on the policy. If you book with a ‘book now, pay later’ policy it is possible that you forget to cancel before your payment date. And this could cost you a lot of money (average cost of hotel accommodation is $ 40 per night!). Same thing goes for booking a refundable accommodation/room. You would have to endure cancellations fees, which would not make sense to you especially if your visa is denied because of other factors.

c- Shallow hotel reservation caused by ‘book without credit card policy’

Sometimes, a reservation is not concrete because an applicant decided to do a‘book without credit card policy’. This is not difficult to figure out. Most hotels service their clients on first come, first served basis. While a visa applicant makes a ‘book without credit card policy’ booking on hotel website, another client walks into the hotel building, pays cash and demands the same room. Do you think the hotel will still keep the space for a ‘book without credit card’ customer?! (We also do not think so.)

4- Hotel reservation may not be paid for

After all that has been said, the embassy still does not expect you to pay for the actual hotel accommodation fees just to apply for visa. If the hotel can help you keep an accommodation without you making payment, then the embassy is fine with it.

The embassy is just being fair and protecting themselves. They understand that visa is not guaranteed upon application and would not be responsible for your loss. We would speculate that this is entirely how many embassies have been able to dodge law-suites for all these years. Because, seriously, many would have sued embassies for refusal after paying for proof of hotel accommodation (if necessitated by embassies).

But this is not so. There is actually a way to get hotel reservation as proof of accommodation for visa application without paying actual hotel fees.