VFS Global biometric appointment system doesn't work.

The VFS Global appointment system doesn't seem to work.

I am an applicant for British citizenship by descent (route UKF - through my father) and I applied in May, so now I have been waiting an incredible eight months even though my application is astoundingly straightforward and I provided more than the documentation they required.

Yesterday, nearly two months after requesting it, I received (by email) the letter to have my biometrics done in Vancouver. (I live in the USA and in October I received a letter giving me the option of having my biometrics done in Canada or Mexico because biometric centres aren't yet available in the USA even though they've had since April to sort out this non-rocket-science issue which every other country has now solved). In a state of near-ecstasy, I performed all the procedures required by the VFS Global website, including paying their ten-pound fee. But when I chose 'schedule an appointment' from the page containing all my information, including my full name, my UKN number and the acknowledgement of my fee, I only saw a page called 'Applicant List' containing no clickable links (except one which goes back to their home page) and the single sentence "Either Appointment details are not found or appointment has already taken, please check with rescheduling appointment" (the atrocious grammar and punctuation are in the original - I would never perpetrate such linguistic horrors).

I stayed up until 6:30 in the morning trying to solve this problem in various ways, but to no avail. These people are obsessed with automating everything, but they also specialise in having the automation done by people who don't know how to do it. Then they remove all possibility of talking to an actual person because, hey, it's all automated. All 'contact me' things lead back to the website as if it were a panacaea for curing all ailments caused by... the website. Obviously the Vancouver visa centre, in common with all the visa centres in Canada (and perhaps elsewhere) as far as I can see, provides no phone number or even an email address.

What to do? I have printed out the biometrics letter and the receipt for the ten-pound biometric appointment fee (which at present represents merely a donation of ten quid to the estimable VFS Global for services not rendered) as well as a covering letter explaining the situation, and I shall almost certainly send these by post (unless of course I manage to set an appointment on Monday because somehow their automated magic doesn't work during weekends - see how tenaciously I manufacture probably unjustifiable hopes to keep myself nominally sane after being tormented so long by these reprehensible automata). However, I fully expect them to ignore my letter.

Can I simply turn up (in Canada - reaching which is by no means free) with my biometric letter and receipt, explaining that the online appointment centre is kaput, has joined the choir invisible, has ceased to be, has joined the majority, and is in point of fact an ex online appointment centre?

I was hoping to go there on Monday the 18th of January because it is a holiday in the USA and consequently I wouldn't have to take one of my precious days off work for this.

Any help you may be able to give will be much appreciated.

Another member has posted that they just turned up with the documents you have listed in Canada at the centre and biometrics were taken. Also for a UKF or UKM application.

Thanks very much for your swift reply. If nothing else transpires, I'll turn up in Vancouver, laden with divers paperwork and sundry accoutrements, hoping that they act human about this and let me get the thing done.

Does anyone have an email address or (the effrontery) a phone number for contacting these VFS people? All I could find on this forum was an email for India (info.inuk@vfshelpline.com). I could try to generate a Canadian analogue by testing info.cauk, info.canuk, simply info@vfshelpline.com, and so on, but I think it's better to get an email address that actually exists rather than trying to extrapolate one based on partial information. Even a very general email would help - at this point I'm grasping at straws.

Thanks again for any help.

Contributor Will47786 found an email for the Canadian VFS Global people. Here's what he has to say:

Try this email address it might help. I used it and got a reply. Put the subject line of ATTENTION DUTY MANAGER. Keep sending them the same email until someone replies. I also put my phone numbers in the email as well and within 2 days I got a call and they helped me make an appointment in Vancouver to do my biometrics

UKVI.Feedback.ca@vfshelpline.com

I hope this helps for anyone else who has encountered issues with signing up for and getting biometric appointments with VFS Global. Let me know how it works out.

Will47786

The only other VFS Global help email that I know about is the one for India, which is info.inuk@vfshelpline.com.

It seems that if you go to this page http://www.vfsglobal.co.uk/Global/ and choose a country and then go to 'feedback and complaints', you will get a page like this
http://www.vfsglobal.co.uk/Canada/feedb ... aints.html
(mutatis mutandis, obviously) which will hopefully provide the appropriate email address for the country in question. It is rather sneaky of them to hide this in 'feedback and complaints' but not make it available in 'contacts'. Anyway, I hope this helps anyone who has trouble booking their biometric appointment.

@Antsmall

When trying to book an appointment with VFS Global in Canada, did you by any chance select "USA" for "Country of Residence"?

Though the logical choice, this would likely be the cause of the issue. If you choose "Canada" as country of residence, you should be able to book an appointment at a VFS Global location in Canada.

See here: http://www.immigrationboards.com/britis ... f#p1273588

Hope that helps!

No, I chose Canada because I'd read through what others on this forum had experienced (including the one in the post that you gave in your message, saying that the VFS Global people had said that we should choose Canada) and I went according to what they reported. But thanks for taking the time to reply.

Fingers crossed, I've now booked my biometrics for the 19th. (We're going over the long weekend of Martin Luther King Day which has a holiday Monday in the USA so we can spend a little time seeing Vancouver). I got an email from the VFS people today offering me a choice of dates, and I chose one and they confirmed. So I think that the email address which is available through the 'feedback and complaints' part of the website is the thing to use for other people who have problems booking an appointment through the VFS website (I've seen evidence of a few other people having a similar problem). That is the email address from which they contacted me, and they were swift, unlike any of the other parts of this procedure so far.

My only doubt at this point is that the confirmation from VFS is only an email. I printed it out and I hope that it is enough, since I don't have some sort of appointment letter other than that. I'll ask them by email and see what they say. I do have all the other documentation, but the website still doesn't work for me (even after I tried with four different browsers on four different computers, both Mac and Windows).

I'm really hoping that things go smoothly from here, given that until now, they... didn't.

@antsmall

Aha, sounds like you did figure it out.

Good luck with your biometric indoctrination

Weird that the site doesn't work at all for you. Stressful stuff!