Terrible experience with their Ankara…
Terrible experience with their Ankara office. I applied for a visa to visit a conference in Italy. First of all IMPOSSIBLE to find available time slot. Also this is illogical to say that conference participation is a touristic type of visa. I have wasred around 2 months of every 20 minutes check throughout the day to finally catch the slot. This should be education,science-related type of visa or whatever and other conditions to get it. Guess what! Ofc only prime lounge lux whatever slot could be finally found to experience incompetence and biased application assessment. All the evidence were provided: invjtation letter from the organizing committee, paid tickets, booked hotel for one week (also paid),my student card, the confirmation from a governmental source that I am a student, my bank account with a euro account. Their site required around 45€ per day,I put around 3,000€ with all the facilities prepaid,this is more than enough for 7 days,2 out of which are spent on a plane, in the airports and commuting there. I applied with all the documentation,after one week they called me and asked to provide the explanation of how I got my money, seriously?
You first ask to provide the bank account info and then you ask how I get my money? Ok, I explained that I worked before studying and I have my savings,plus my husband works. He even had to write the supporting statement telling that he agrees to sponsor my trip. Could you tell it when I applied or much better state it on your site? Do you think that ppl sit and wait for your call to go to your office in the middle of a workday? After all that nervous process, coming there 2 times, writing explanation letters of how come a person has money, taking into account my THREE schengen visas before this application and no violations in crossing the European borders,they rejected my application explaining that they are not sure if I was going to come back to Türkiye. Totally not clear. What made me write all these is that later I learnt that Italy side rejected all students from Türkiye. Isn't this biased? If I am a student means I want to run away from my country leaving my family here and violate the migration rules? I even read that some sts mingled and sue them and won their visas eventually. Why shall we prove in a humiliating manner that we have a right to visit the conference? Why the employees of the company do not give clear instructions first of all that some evidence must be provided,why are they calling applicants later to explain smthg in a written form? Give clear instructions who should explain what. Make a mechanism of finding the slots more adequate. Check the competence of the employees accepting the documents. Make the visa types clear for everybody who goes for academic purposes cannot be considered as tourists, the same is applicable for those who go for medical purposes. And since you are working on a behalf of the embassy, please provide some statistics openly and if the bias exists [there are evidence and they are given in court] accept this and give those students their rights back, compensating their moral and material losses.