I got the Schengen visa on my second attempt!! Thank you for the help :)
So some context - 31F, Solo trip, Indian. In September I had applied for Schengen VISA via Switzerland through a travel agency and it had gotten rejected. I was quite dejected as I was really looking forward to travelling to Europe, esp. after a tough year personally.
One of the biggest mistake I did was trusting the travel agent and just going ahead with the cover letter he had shared.
This time around, though it was a little more cumbersome, I did the entire process myself and made sure to make the cover letter personal.
I received a lot of help in terms of tips for the cover letter and the refundable train tickets that I can book. Without these tips, I don’t think I would’ve received my visa this time around 🎉🎉🎉
Wanted to share the list of tips that I felt were very useful for me: - Please please do your own research. This helps in 2 ways - one, if the agent makes a mistake, you are able to correct it. Two, when the vfs agent unnecessarily pushes on certain things, you are able to confidently push back (in my case, the vfs guy didn’t want me to submit my old passport even though my new passport had only one stamp but since I knew it was important to show travel history, I pushed back and asked him to submit the old one as well.). I’ve read several threads where the vfs officer misdirects a person. Better to have done good research in such cases.
Booked refundable tickets for both flights and trains. Though they were quite expensive, it was worth not stressing about losing money if visa is rejected. For trains, I booked via deutsche bahn.
I work for a start up, so one of the points that helped me emphasise that I’ll return is sharing the ESOP grants with vesting period and their value.
For the cover letter itself, I had super personalised it to my interests which in this case was art by Van Gogh. My detailed itinerary also called out specific things which emphasised the intention of my trip.
Though it is not really needed but based on a YouTube video recommendation I had included the reasons my last visa was rejected and what I’ve done to alleviate any doubt they might have this time.
For example, reason 1 for rejection was that I might not come back to the home country - so I told them that the intent for tourism was valid and used those days off to visit another country - even mentioned the exact duration basis passport stamps.
Reason 2 was that my intentions for the trip weren’t clear. For that I reemphasised that I have shared a detailed itinerary this time with a specific objective for the trip
Of course, at the end of the day, we don’t know what really helped but doing the entire process myself and making sure to follow all tips I gathered from Reddit helped me to be sure that I’ve done the best that I can do to give the visa officer confidence to issue the visa.
Thank you everyone, once again!!