Cultural / Sports / Religious Visa (Schengen Type C)

The inviting company signs it, on its letterhead, naming you personally, the exact dates, the purpose of the meetings and — crucially — who is paying for what. Officers verify these: a letter with no signatory title, no company registration detail and no reachable phone number is worse than no letter, because it fails a verification call. Your own side matters just as much: a leave sanction or board resolution, your employment or directorship proof, and a travel history that fits the seniority the letter claims for you.

Meetings, negotiations, conferences, trade fairs and training you attend are normally fine. What is not permitted is gainful employment — being paid by an entity in Austria, or doing work that a local would otherwise be hired for, even unpaid in some categories. That line is where business visas get refused and, worse, where they get cancelled at the border. If your trip involves anything close to it, tell us the actual plan and we will tell you which route it needs.

90 days in any 180-day period. The window rolls: on any given day the authorities count backwards 180 days and add up the days you were inside. It is not 90 days per country and it does not reset when you leave and come back. Entries are single entry, tied to event dates. Getting this arithmetic wrong is how people end up overstaying without realising, which follows you into every future application.

You apply to the country you will spend the most nights in. If the nights are equal across several, you apply to the one you enter first. Applying to the "easier" consulate when your itinerary says otherwise is a well-known refusal ground and, if the mismatch looks deliberate, it reads as misrepresentation rather than a mistake. Send us your itinerary and we will tell you which mission is the correct one for your trip — sometimes that is not Austria.

Three things sit between today and your trip: preparing the file properly, waiting for an appointment, and the mission's own processing. Austria currently states 15 working days from when the Embassy receives your complete application (not counting VFS transport time). May extend up to 30 days if additional scrutiny or documents are required, and up to 45 calendar days in exceptional cases. for the decision itself. We control the first, which is usually days. The middle depends on slot releases. The third is entirely the mission's and no consultant can shorten it — anyone telling you otherwise is selling something they cannot deliver. Tell us your travel date and we will tell you honestly whether it is realistic.

Most of it is not ours. The Austria government fee (currently €90) goes to the mission and the visa-centre fee goes to VFS — both charged to you at cost, never marked up, and shown as separate lines on one GST invoice in the registered company name. Our service fee is the only part we set, and it is published rather than quoted case by case.

You send what you have on WhatsApp and a licensed consultant says the same working day whether the case is ready. We build the file around your profile, check every document against the others, write the cover letter to match them, and hold the file complete so the first workable appointment can be taken the moment it appears. You attend biometrics; we track the file to the decision (Austria currently states 15 working days from when the Embassy receives your complete application (not counting VFS transport time). May extend up to 30 days if additional scrutiny or documents are required, and up to 45 calendar days in exceptional cases.). Government and visa-centre fees (€90 for this visa) are charged at cost; our own fee is published, and if the visa is refused that fee comes back in full.