VFS - Your service doesn't even deserve 1*

I do not understand how a huge company like VFS London can provide such a poor service, how do you keep your contract?

We apply for a retirement visa and student visas for our kids. We received an email from the South African embassy saying the kids student visas have been approved as the parents visas have been granted. Approval dated 4th December, we received this email on the 19th December.

We waited as didn't receive any confirmations regarding our retirement visa, we tried and tried to login in and track the outcome of our visa but all we got was - No records found.

We are currently away in Thailand, so the option of just walking into VFS to speak with someone is currently not possible.

I emailed VFS and got a reply to my email but it was so vague that the reply was useless. I emailed the manager asking if she can check if our retirement visas are ready to collect with the kids student visa's as the kid's approval letters says we have our visas approved, and also why we can't log in ourselves to check the progress of our visas? She rep**** saying that they have no influence regarding the outcome of our visas.

OMG, I never asked for them to have influence over anything.

All I need is to be able to log in and track our visa progress but the system is not working! so I emailed again giving the manager our login details and asking why we can't log in and if she can try and log in for us. We never got a response from her again, even when I emailed again asking only about the log in and if we have a time limit collecting the kids visas - NO REPLY

It's now the 9th of January and we don't know what the progress of our retirement visas is and if there is a time limit collecting the kids student visas.

We don't want to send granddad twice to London to get the visas on our behalf, just getting him to agree to go once was hard enough, so now it looks like I have to fly from Thailand to London and got to VFS in person, maybe I can get some help then.

As a customer, I can't even express our disappointment as not knowing where or how to turn to for help, we tried emailing the South African embassy as instructed by VFS and no reply from them either and they don't even answer the phone.

As a company I am sure VFS is well aware of how stressful visa applications are and to put the cherry on top they opt to provided a service that doesn't even deserve a 1 star.

VFS, who are you actually accountable to? Because I would love to write to them to express my disappoint at a tracking system that simply doesn't work.