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- Jun 24, 2008
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Booking an Appointment
When submitting our applications online, we applied one after the other and received separate reference numbers and a group reference number. So one might assume that you book your appointment as a group, but this is not the case; each applicant is processed separately. (God knows what happens if one of us is approved and the other isn't?) The process for booking an appointment is confusing.
When/if you manage to login, you will notice it says there are no active applications; in fact, this means that you don't have an appointment yet, not that your application has gone astray. You then click on "Start New Booking" and you pick your application centre (either Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide or Perth), the appointment category "Visa" and the sub-category "Long Stay Visa". If there are appointments available, you will see something like this: Earliest available slot for 1 applicants is : 17-05-2024.
It never says "2 applicants"! You click on continue, fill in your details and then click "Save". At this point it asks you if your wish to add another applicant: DON'T! If you do there will be no appointments as each applicant needs to apply and also book an appointment separately. Of course there is nowhere that tells you this. At some point I managed to speak to a call centre agent that spoke clearly enough so that I could understand her and she advised to book separate applications and then call and ask that the appointments be changed to the same day. We tried that but when we called back we were told "No, you have to reschedule the appointments online yourself". So you will most likely end up with appointments on different days which for those that live outside the five capitals noted above, can be most inconvenient. Only thing you can do is to check regularly and see if a (cancelled) appointment appears on a more convenient day.
So now it's time to get the paperwork together....
When submitting our applications online, we applied one after the other and received separate reference numbers and a group reference number. So one might assume that you book your appointment as a group, but this is not the case; each applicant is processed separately. (God knows what happens if one of us is approved and the other isn't?) The process for booking an appointment is confusing.
When/if you manage to login, you will notice it says there are no active applications; in fact, this means that you don't have an appointment yet, not that your application has gone astray. You then click on "Start New Booking" and you pick your application centre (either Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide or Perth), the appointment category "Visa" and the sub-category "Long Stay Visa". If there are appointments available, you will see something like this: Earliest available slot for 1 applicants is : 17-05-2024.
It never says "2 applicants"! You click on continue, fill in your details and then click "Save". At this point it asks you if your wish to add another applicant: DON'T! If you do there will be no appointments as each applicant needs to apply and also book an appointment separately. Of course there is nowhere that tells you this. At some point I managed to speak to a call centre agent that spoke clearly enough so that I could understand her and she advised to book separate applications and then call and ask that the appointments be changed to the same day. We tried that but when we called back we were told "No, you have to reschedule the appointments online yourself". So you will most likely end up with appointments on different days which for those that live outside the five capitals noted above, can be most inconvenient. Only thing you can do is to check regularly and see if a (cancelled) appointment appears on a more convenient day.
So now it's time to get the paperwork together....
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