In order to travel to China, you must have a Chinese visa. There are several companies that help you with this process. Typically, I am comfortable with doing my own paperwork, but we had a slight problem. In order to get your visa for China, you must have at least 3 months left on your passport. When we started to do the paperwork, we discovered that my son’s passport was actually expired! This was the first time I had used an agency to expedite a passport application, but as soon as we received his passport, we immediately sent for his visa.
We used the VisaHQ service. It was quick and easy to fill out. Just remember if you are working for VIPKid, you are not an employee. You are an independent contractor. They sent updates at every step along the way, and we got our visas very quickly (we did pay a bit extra to get them expedited, but at this point I was getting very nervous). I did make a mistake when I was filling out our paperwork which resulted in a double charge, but they corrected it within a few hours (it may have been sooner, but I did not check until a few hours had passed).
I know that some people on our trip lived close enough to the places that handle the visas and they were able to do their own paperwork. And while we are relatively close to Houston (about a 5 hour drive), I was not able to make the trip twice to drop off the paperwork and pick up the visas at this busy time of year. It was much more economical and less stressful to pay VisaHQ to handle the paperwork for me. I know there are other options available, but VisaHQ seemed the best fit for us.
Please let me know if you have any other questions. If you would like to read more about our trip, click here to go to the Introduction.
