Schengen visa urgently needed but no appointments

Hello,

for our Christmas trip to Germany I need a tourist visa for my wife, a Chinese citizen. We are both living in the UK. We were planning to travel on Dec 14th, but only got a visa appointment on Dec 6th, which seems too late for our travel date. I checked France (we could change our trip to make France the main destination), but here appointment availability is even worse. Are there any ways to submit the applications sooner? I see there are some commercial "visa concierges". Would they have earlier slots reserved ?

Hello,

I urgently need a tourist visa for Germany but the only appointment I got at the visa center is about 10 days before the intended travel date. On the website of the German embassy it says that applications should be submitted 15 days or more before travel. Does anyone know whether this is a strict requirement, I.e. would the application be rejected on these grounds? Or is it OK if I am happy to take the risk that I get the visa after the intended departure and then rebook flights etc? In the past Germany was usually quite fast

hey! hope you handled that all without issues!
I tried to apply for a Finnish visa some time ago, having 20 days left or so (it was stated that processing would take this amount of days), I was told that there were additional delays as they were sending the documents somewhere, other people get their visa in more than 20 days and it's basically pointless.