Visa Application Centres: VFS Global, TLScontact and Others

A visa application centre (VAC) is an office run by a private company, such as VFS Global, TLScontact, BLS International or iDATA, on behalf of a government. It gives information, books appointments, collects applications, fees and biometrics, and returns passports. It never decides a visa; the embassy or consulate does.

Governments use these companies because the administrative side of visa processing is heavy: queues, fingerprints, payments and passport handling. TLScontact describes its role as managing "the administrative aspects of the visa process via a global network of Visa Application Centres", which lets government clients focus on their "core decision-making role".

For the Schengen area, the rules are written into law. The EU Visa Code, Regulation (EC) No 810/2009 as amended by Regulation (EU) 2019/1155, calls these companies external service providers and sets out in Article 43 what they may and may not do. Article 8(10) adds that a Member State with no consulate and no representation in a country should try to cooperate with an external service provider there.

For an agency owner, three consequences follow:

For a short definition you can share with staff, see the visa application centre glossary entry.

Article 43(6) of the Visa Code lists the tasks an external service provider may carry out for a Schengen state. They are, in summary:

Article 43(4) is just as important: the examination of applications, interviews where appropriate, the decision on applications and the printing and affixing of visa stickers are carried out only by the consulate. Article 43(5) says external service providers shall not have access to the Visa Information System (VIS) under any circumstances.

A related protection is Article 9(5): an applicant shall not be required to appear in person at more than one location to lodge an application. Biometrics are collected where the application is lodged; see biometrics for the wider background.

The practical lesson for your team: centre staff check that the file is complete against a checklist. They do not assess whether it is persuasive. The quality of the application is still your agency's job and the client's.

A handful of companies run most centres worldwide. Each one describes its own scope on its own website, and each government decides who it contracts, so treat the list below as a description of the providers, not a map of which country uses which one.

The client lists above are what the providers state on their websites at the time of writing (September 2026). Mandates move between providers and differ by country of application, not just by destination. A client applying for the same destination from two different countries may deal with two different companies.

Keep a verified record per destination and per country of application in your country requirements, with the embassy page that confirms it and the date you last checked. When a mandate changes, update the record once and every consultant follows the same instruction.

A client at a visa application centre usually pays two separate things: the visa fee, which goes to the government, and the provider's service fee. Many centres also sell optional extras. Keeping these apart in your quotes avoids arguments later; the government fee vs service fee entry explains the distinction.

For Schengen visas, Article 17 of the Visa Code sets the rules:

Annex X of the Visa Code requires the contract to list the services covered by the mandatory service fee and to instruct the provider to clearly inform the public that other charges cover optional services.

A real example: at the time of writing (September 2026), the German missions in Türkiye publish both the Schengen visa fee and a separate iDATA service fee, payable in Turkish lira — and have shown more than one service-fee figure on their own pages. Check the missions' page on the day you quote and use only what it says.

VFS Global lists optional services such as form-filling assistance, premium lounges, SMS alerts and courier delivery, and states that opting for them "has no influence on a quicker or positive visa decision". Say that to clients plainly. If your own agency resells optional services, show them as optional line items, and never imply they improve the outcome. The pricing strategy guide covers how to present your own fee next to these.

Appointment systems differ by provider and by government. Some centres take bookings directly; others use a waiting list. The German missions in Türkiye, for example, describe a process where applicants first register on a waiting list with iDATA, receive an email confirmation, and are later notified of a specific date to submit their application.

VFS Global's fraud guidance states that appointments are free of cost and can be booked only on its own website, and warns applicants about scammers who claim to be associated with it. When demand is high, a market in "guaranteed" slots appears around every centre. An agency should stay entirely out of it. The reasons are practical, not just ethical:

What an agency can legitimately do is help clients through the official channel, in each client's own name, where the provider's terms allow third-party help. The Visa Code also lets an application be lodged by an accredited commercial intermediary (Article 9(4)); check with the consulate concerned whether and how that route is available before offering it.

Finally, the Visa Code requires Member States to run a complaints procedure covering the conduct of external service provider staff and the application process (Article 38(5)), and to publish information on it. If a client has a genuine grievance about a centre, point them to that procedure rather than to social media.

With ten clients, appointments live in one consultant's head. With a hundred, they need a system. The agencies that cope with scarce slots treat booking as a pipeline with owners and deadlines, not as a scramble. A workable routine:

Family and group bookings need extra care. Each person usually needs their own appointment and biometrics, and one missing document can hold up the rest. The family applications guide and the multi-country guide cover the sequencing.

Scale is where tooling pays off. RotaVisa runs applications across 40+ countries at a 98% approval rate, which is only manageable when every booking, document and status sits in one place; the RotaVisa case study explains the set-up. VisaCRM builds and runs that kind of platform for visa agencies, with applicant management, document checklists and client messaging under the agency's own brand. It does not book appointments on provider websites or fill in government forms.

For the specific problem of too few slots, the appointment bottlenecks guide covers waiting lists, rescheduling and how to set honest expectations. If you mainly handle Schengen files, see the Schengen visa management page for how the workflow is usually structured.

Most problems at the counter are avoidable with a short briefing. Send it in writing, in the client's language, and keep a copy in the file. It should cover:

Write this briefing once per destination and centre, then send it automatically when the appointment is confirmed. Consistent messages reduce the number of "what do I bring?" calls, which is the same pattern behind Anyvisa tripling its application capacity without adding headcount and cutting support tickets by 75%, as the Anyvisa case study describes. The client communication guide has more on writing messages that clients actually read.

Your clients hand passports, fingerprints and financial documents to a centre, so they will ask what happens to that data. For Schengen visas, the Visa Code answers some of it:

None of this covers what happens inside your own agency. Before the client reaches the centre, your team has already collected the same documents. Your own retention periods, access controls and storage location are your responsibility; the data privacy guide for visa agencies and the answer on where applicant data is stored are good places to start.