Ian

Apr 8, 2025

Very poor experience

I visited BLS London today. I've applied for visas many times. This is the worst visa application experience ever. 1. Website There was no free slot appointment available so I had to pay £100 for their "premium" service that's always available. Not to mention other fees that you can't opt out (more below). The website had an appalling user interface. I work in tech so I'm not technologically illiterate. I know it's not remotely difficult for them to make the website a little bit more usable. First, uploading your own photo always showed errors. I had to look up online how to do it. If you google "bls upload photo". you can see all the people's attempts to pass this ridiculous system. Next, there's this live photo check where you have to open the camera to verify your face. Again, they made it ridiculously difficult. I had to try many times. I never had a problem with a face check from the UK home office before. Finally, there's no saved progress, so if you get an error at any step in the process you have to start over again. Also, if you spend too long (maybe 20 minutes!?) on the application, you have to start again from scratch. In the end, I got the appointment and the filled application which I had to edit anyway because it didn't fill in some information that should be filled. I don't understand why they don't just let the applicant fill in the form themselves as it's downloadable from their website anyway. 2. Appointment at the centre The centre layout was confusing. There were two counters, but there's no sign to indicate what counter you should go to. People had to ask each other about that. I stayed in the queue at the wrong counter before I realised I had to change. It's very easy to just put up the sign that this counter is for printing and another counter is for getting the queue token. The document checking process was fine, probably because I used the premium service. However, when I moved onto the biometric collection, I had to use the same counter as the regular service. That's when I experienced poor service. The staff was very rushed. He didn't wait until I sat down properly before taking my photo. The fingerprint collection was lousy. I have faded fingerprints. It usually took me a few tries to collect them properly, but the staff there just took it once and moved on very quickly. In the end, I paid £206.59 at the centre (£1.95 SMS service fee, £14.55 BLS service fee, £74.65 Visa fee, £29.99 Courier, £100.00 Premium service). This doesn't include £14.55 that I had paid when booking for the appointment on the website. However, the service I've received wasn't remotely close to the fee I had to pay. I know this is not unexpected when you have a monopoly, but I think VLS is still better than this. This really puts me off from ever applying for the spain visa again.