Tag Archives: Visa at Your Doorstep

VFS Global’s Visa At Your Doorstep solution shared that it has witnessed a 20% growth in demand from travellers, both from Middle East and within the UAE, in the first half of 2024. This year, VFS Global added Bulgaria, Croatia and Japan to the list of countries it offers the service for. The service entails trained professionals visiting the applicant’s preferred location to accept the documents and enrol biometrics and has been popular globally among corporate and student groups, providing convenience to those applying with a higher number of co-passengers. However, this trend has recently been shifting towards families and individual travellers, with Dubai leading in demand from the UAE. Monaz Billimoria, Regional Head, VFS Global, said, “The Visa At your Doorstep service witnessed an uptick in demand during the pandemic because of health and safety precautions, but today’s growing trend of families and individuals opting for Visa At Your Doorstep shows a shift in the traveller sentiment towards choosing comfort and convenience over cost. With demand for international travel ever-increasing, we look forward to providing all our customers best-in-class service.” The Visa At Your Doorstep solution is an optional service and can be booked online on www.vfsglobal.com. Opting for this service does not have any bearing on the processing timeline or decision made on a visa application. This remains the sole prerogative of the respective client governments. In the UAE, the service is available for Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Türkiye, Ukraine and UK visa services.

As the leading visa outsourcing and technology partner for several governments and diplomatic missions worldwide, VFS Global has achieved a milestone by processing a record 200 million visa applications. Set up in 2001, the company touched its first 100 million applications milestone in May 2015. Since then, the next 100 million applications were processed over a record four-year period. In 2018 alone, VFS Global processed 26.7 million applications globally – the most number of visa applications processed in any single year, registering a 16 per cent increase year-on-year. Commenting on this achievement, Zubin Karkaria, CEO, VFS Global Group, said, “We take pride in this achievement of processing our 200 millionth visa application, with 100 million of these processed in a timespan of the last four years. We are grateful for the co-operation of the 62 client governments we serve – 18 of which were added in last four years, pointing to the trust and credibility we have built since we started this journey in 2001.” Even through its rapid expansion, the company has introduced game-changing visa solutions offering greater convenience, reliability and flexibility in service. Some of these are: Visa at Your Doorstep, Mobile Visa Application Centres, the first visa services chatbot ViVA among others, introduced in the recent years. In terms of the total visa market (both outsourced and non-outsourced), VFS Global’s share is 15 per cent. Across the world, there are as many as 50 players catering to the visa outsourcing business, and together they hold a market share that is identical to VFS Global. VFS Global today has an unparalleled network of over 3,000 application centres with operations in 147 countries.