Tourist visa processing delays and lack of feedback

When applying for visas, the Australian high commission forces you to use their appointed agent, TLScontact/Teleperformance. This agent does not provide any indication of visa processing times, whether by email, phone or on their website. Once you have lodged your visa application it is impossible to obtain any feedback from the agent or from the high commission. The standard response is ‘we are still within published global processing times and are thus unable to respond’. There is a complete lack of willingness to assist in any way whatsoever, and I presume they would rather we did not try to visit Australia.

My wife’s brother and family are all citizens of Australia, but to try and visit them for Christmas was our worst travel nightmare on record. On our planned day of departure we had to cancel all of our tickets and 3 weeks of accommodation as we did not obtain the visas in time. 3 days later, the visas were issued, and I had to rebook the entire trip at peak period rates (for our family of 4). We are frequent travellers, we had visited Australia 4 years previously, we even still had 2-year Schengen visas in all of our passports, none of which helps.

I have lodged multiple complaints, but to date no acknowledgement whatsoever of any problems on their side, let alone any type of apology.