Christmas – Silly Season
Christmas seems to bring out the best and worst in many of us. Always been this strange mixture of religious and secular, and somewhere along the way it was mixed with American consumerism with the expression “Christmas is a time of giving” (which means a time of SPENDING!), and of course “EIGHT SANTAS – NO WAITING!”
In Australia, it’s always been a time of families getting together, exchanging gifts, eating and drinking to excess, and usually someone fighting with someone and swearing never to attend a family get-together ever again!
The point is that regardless of how you celebrate it, it’s a time of high expectation and of high emotions. Add a long-distance relationship to that, and emotion can often win over logic and practicality. How does this affect the quest for an Australian visa?
So, time for a little reality-check.
Visas and Christmas
Fact One – What the Australian Embassy say
If you are planning to travel to Australia over the festive periods, please lodge your Visitor (subclass 600) visa applications before Friday 23 November 2018.
The Australian Embassy will be closed for public holiday from Tuesday 25 December 2018 until Tuesday 1 January 2019. Visas will not be processed during this closure.
Fact Two – Down Under Visa annual holidays
Our last day of work is 20 December 2018
Fact Three – Normal processing times
At a normal time of year:
- Tourist visas take a few weeks to prepare
- Then tourist visas take a few weeks to be processed by the Embassy
We don’t have four weeks left!
Fact Four – Airline bookings
Airline bookings around Christmas is the busiest time of year and therefore empty seats are few and far between. Anything you can get late in the year is going to be horribly expensive too.
So, what to do?
Firstly, please don’t tell us you want to start a new visa application so you can be together at Christmas! It won’t happen! Not at this stage, sorry.
And if you’ve been waiting for your visa application to be lodged, we will lodge it as soon as we can. But we don’t rush things through and risk making horrible mistakes. Our admin staff are trained to be efficient and not to waste time, but their priority is quality. We have a zero tolerance of errors, and this will never be compromised.
So, in advance? We thank you for your patience and your understanding of reality.
And to all of you, we hope you will enjoy your Christmas and New Year as much as we fully intend to. We hope this time brings you closer to those whom you love and who love you. Let it be a time to realise that there is nothing more important than these precious people, and we wish you the peace and the time to reflect on this.
Note that we already have our Christmas present for this year. This is Megan, and she came to join the Harvie family last week. New to the world, and rescued from what would have been a hard life. So we’re happy!
Congratulations on the new addition to your family but most importantly congratulations for using your big Aussie heart – the way we are taught to!
Good in you mate and Merry Christmas..!
Merry Christmas and a happy new year to all the staff of downunder visa
Rob & Wilma
Will see you in the new year
To everyone at Down Under, have an awesome Christmas and New Year, and a special thanks to you Jeff. Being nieve about visas led me to you guys, and so glad it did. So a massive Thank you to the Down Under Staff and all the best for the New Year, and congratulations on the new addition to your family.
Jeff & Presila