Wedding in Brazil, spouse visa application immediately after

[pdon]

I am a UK citizen living in the UK. My fiancée is Brazilian and is currently living in the UK on a student visitor visa which expires in August, when she will go to Brazil. We are getting married in Brazil in September.

The plan is for her to apply for a UK spouse visa as soon as possible after the wedding, as I will only be able to spend a few weeks in Brazil and we don't want to spend too long living apart when I return to the UK. We're going to be in Rio de Janeiro (where the visa application centre is) shortly after the wedding so were hoping to take advantage of that to do the application then.

A possible problem that I can foresee with the visa application is that, when we marry, her name will change. Her existing passport will have her "old" name but the visa application will presumably have to be in her "new" name. Is this possible?

What we don't want to hear, but may have to accept, is that she needs to renew her passport first to update it to her new name before applying for the UK visa. This would inevitably add time to the process as well as requiring another long journey to Rio de Janeiro to go to the application centre at a later date.

A related problem is that her name will be different by the time she gets the return flight back to the UK and whether the airline will allow that, but I guess that's not really for this forum.

Maybe our lives will be easier if she doesn't change her name upon marriage!

Any advice would be very much appreciated.

[BigEasy]

I would recommend you avoid changing her name. The whole visa process is such a bureaucratic nightmare anywhere I think you'd be foolish to complicate it further and face more potential delays whilst waiting for new documents, etc.

Good luck.

[pdon]

The bureaucracy involved for the wedding in Brazil and the bureaucracy involved for the UK visa are bad enough when the two things are considered separately, but our problem is the overlap between the two which just complicates matters further. It's difficult getting straight answers from the authorities about what's possible and what's not. I was just hoping that someone else might have gone through a similar process and be able to give us the benefit of their experience.

We might have to accept that she'll keep her current name. As much as we would like her to change her name it might just not be worth the effort or the risk of things dragging on too long.

I suppose there's the possibility that she could change her name at a later date once she's back in the UK, but we'll have to look into what would be involved with that from a bureaucratic point of view. And it's not quite so romantic either!

[MPH80]

I can offer you my experience.

My wife came on a fiancee visa - and thus her maiden name. We got married and she changed her name for certain documents - e.g. bank accounts, but didn't on her visa.

So her Peruvian passport and her visa remained in her maiden name. We then secured US and Canadian visitor visas in maiden name. All fine.

She subsequently went though life with two names effectively. Her visa was in her maiden name and everything else in the UK was in her married name.

When the time came to get her citizenship - she got it in her maiden name, but then her british passport was secured using her married name by simply supplying her naturalisation certificate and wedding certificate. Low and behold - the passport arrived in her married name.

Now - this is all helped by the way Peru thinks of married names.

Instead of being Snra <married name>, they are Snra <Maiden Name> de <Married Name> (actually - it's even more complex than that - but it simplifies matters).

So my wife will always have two different surnames anyway.