Why Do You Need Dummy Hotel Bookings for Schengen Visa Applications?

 

The first question you might ask if you haven’t applied for a visa before, is “Why do I need dummy hotel bookings for visa applications?

There are several answers to this question.

First of all, let’s touch upon the main reason for the need for dummy hotel bookings for visa applications: On most embassy website you will find a list of requirements that you need for your visa application. On each of these requirement lists, you’ll find a few requirements that are the same for almost all countries:

       a hotel booking or reservation for your entire intended stay

       a flight reservation with return flight

It’s not exactly clear why the embassies require this information, because on the same page you will usually find a sentence stating “It is advised against purchasing any tickets before the visa application has been approved.” It can be argued that this might be an outdated requirement, dating from the time when visa agents would book and hold the ticket for you until you confirmed that you wanted it. The other argument is that the embassy and visa officer do need to know your intended travel dates so they can approve your visa accordingly. No matter what the reason behind this requirement though, it is still mandatory and still a requirement you need to oblige to.

In other words; the embassies want proof of a reservation of both your flights and hotels, but they don’t want you to actually pay for anything yet (in case your application is rejected).

It seems straight forward enough, but the problems are; where can you get dummy hotel bookings for visa applications? Before creating Schengen visa flight reservation, we were wondering the exact same. Many hotel booking websites will allow you to book a room without paying for it first, but this does not apply to all, and in addition, there is the added stress of having to remember to cancel a bunch of different reservations. This is particularly stressful for applications like the Schengen Tourist Visa, where you will have to show a big itinerary of booked hotels for long trips in different cities.

Booking up to 30 hotels in a row, making sure they all have a no fee cancellation policy, and then remembering to cancel all of them – that would give even the most seasoned secretary headache from! This also means having to entering your credit card information online, something that’s not always risk free and many travellers don’t feel comfortable giving out their credit card information.

None of these options are great, and travellers all over the world continuously end up wondering how to get the documents they need for their visa applications.