Transit Visa (Schengen Type C) — Seafarers

Often not — and we will tell you so rather than file something you do not need. It depends on your nationality, the airport, whether you stay strictly airside, whether you change terminals, and whether your bags are checked through. Change of terminal or an overnight connection usually tips it into needing one. Send us your itinerary and ticket and we will read the actual routing; this is one of the few questions with a clean yes or no answer once someone looks properly.

Transit only (short — matching connection needs). 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 for the transit. 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 Italy.

Three things sit between today and your trip: preparing the file properly, waiting for an appointment, and the mission's own processing. Italy currently states 15 working days from submission at VFS (extendable up to 45 days). Apply between 15 and 180 working days before your planned departure date. Study (C) short-term visas: up to 90 days processing. The Embassy reserves the right to call for personal interview or additional documents. 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 Italy 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 (Italy currently states 15 working days from submission at VFS (extendable up to 45 days). Apply between 15 and 180 working days before your planned departure date. Study (C) short-term visas: up to 90 days processing. The Embassy reserves the right to call for personal interview or additional documents.). 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.