Hard on the heels of special visas for Indian business applicants, Britain is trying to do something for Chinese visitors.
FT: “Home Office ministers are to start talks with Chinese tour operators in the hope of setting up an easier visa application system for groups of high-spending Asian shoppers who are discouraged by the UK’s border bureaucracy.
The department has been under pressure from luxury retailers to streamline the process for Chinese tourists, who can enter most of continental Europe with just one Schengen visa and are therefore less likely to apply for a separate UK entry. As a result, France receives at least 25 per cent more Chinese tourists each year than Britain does.
Mark Harper, immigration minister, said on Tuesday that he hoped to begin discussions soon. “It’s just thinking about, practically, what can we do with the tour operators to enable them to make that process for getting both [UK and Schengen] visas as straightforward as possible,” he told the Financial Times. “We may not be able to get it to be perfect, but we can get it to be a lot better than it is now, which then makes us a lot more competitive.”
However, Mr Harper suggested that a previous idea of negotiating “parallel” processes – so that data for Schengen and UK visas could be submitted in one joint application – was looking less likely. This was because “you start running into issues about government IT projects and complex issues about data protection”, he said.
Mr Harper also indicated such a joint application would be difficult to achieve diplomatically because it was “not obvious” that it would be in the interests of Britain’s European partners.”
via UK to try and simplify visas for Chinese tourists – FT.com.
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