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| Dublin, Ireland |  Review on April 26, 2010: |
ollie
Rating:  | Review Topic: Direct Consular Filing
Great experience with the embassy. From the very beginning, the security were very friendly and lightened our mood before we went into the stressful environment of the processing room. Luckily we were first in the door and got our applications and other documents submitted within 15 minutes of entering the building. We waited about 5 minutes before being call to the cashiers desk to pay the $400 processing fee.
While waiting for the actual interview, we chatted with the other applicants that were there, they only had 7 or 8 applicants to process that afternoon. Obviously everyone was nervous, after all life changing decisions were being made behind a glass screen. The other applicants were friendly and all of us were having one big conversation about our various situations and how the applications had gone for us so far.
The final step was the actual interview, the lady that conducted it was extremely friendly and it was more of a chat that anything else, we even shared a couple of jokes. The interview only took about 10 minutes and at the end she confirmed that the application had been approved and my passport and other documents for my POE would be mailed out to me within 2 weeks. ***See below for info on how that turned out.
Overall, everyone was very friendly and it seemed that my nerves were totally unnecessary, to whole process took a little over an hour.
Now to find some flights!! javascript:emoticon(\' \')
I've decided to add this amendment to my original review, being 100% honest I couldn't allow my original review remain after how it all turned out. As I said above, after approval at the interview, the officer told me that the visa would be sent out within a fortnight. When they said this we asked if it would be safe to book flights 3 weeks later and were told an undoubted yes. A fortnight passed and no visa arrived. It got to the final few days before our flight date and we decided to investigate where the visa was. The embassy is almost impossible to contact directly, their "Visa Information Service" which charges €2.40 a minute to call only gives general visa information and cannot deal with individual cases, for our situation they directed us to email the embassy and gave us the address. I immediately email them and got an automatic response, "We respond to emails in order of receipt, please allow 2 working days for a reply" understandable, i'm sure they get alot of emails. Sadly that email was sent last friday at noon, it is now thursday evening and there has been no response.
Having given up on the email, i tried again to contact the embassy directly, and was again directed to the visa information service which was no good to me, so i tried again and on tuesday eventually after 20 minutes of being bounced from one operator to another, somebody put me through to the visa office, where nobody answered the phone but i left a message. The following morning (wednesday) someone called me back and went through my situation, she had no idea what went wrong but promised to investigate and call me back that afternoon. This morning (thursday) at 8am, she called me back and said that the visa would be issued today and i could collect it tomorrow, when i told her that i has no way to get to the embassy tomorrow she said that she'd see what she could do and call me back. 2 hours later she called back and said that the visa would be ready and i could pick it up today, which i did and gladly now i am all set to move on monday.
I stand by my original post, the staff are very nice, they are very helpful, the interview was pleasant, my big problem is that having spent upwards of €1000 on fees, it should be an awful lot easier to get a hold of the staff if you do have a problem.
(updated on May 13, 2010)
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Consulate / USCIS Member Review #5968