A visa costs you days, not rupees — and days are the harder budget

The fee for a tourist visa is, in the context of an international holiday, a small number. The processing window is not. A sticker visa that takes twelve working days means your passport is out of your hands for roughly three weeks once you account for courier legs and a public holiday — and during those three weeks you cannot apply for a second visa, cannot travel domestically on the passport, and cannot fix a name-spelling error on a ticket.

This is what makes multi-country itineraries in Europe and Central Asia so much harder to assemble late than a single-country trip to Thailand or Dubai. It is not the money. It is the sequencing.

Two habits fix most of it. First, apply the moment your dates are firm rather than the moment your tickets are issued — the two are usually a fortnight apart, and that fortnight is free. Second, read the processing figure as working days that exclude the destination’s public holidays, then add a week of your own on top. Consulates do not publish their peak-season slowdowns, but they have them, every year, in May and again from October.

And treat any promise of a guaranteed visa as a warning sign. The decision belongs to a consular officer. What an agent can genuinely promise is a complete file, correctly formatted, filed on time — which is, in practice, what most refusals turn on anyway.