Emergencies · September 2026
Someone is dying and you need to get there.
The call came this morning. You are already looking at flights you cannot book, because there is a visa between you and a hospital bed, and the earliest appointment anyone can find you is in November.
We are going to be direct, because you do not have time for anything else. Here is what genuinely moves, what does not, and how to know quickly which situation you are in.
Start with the arithmetic, before the hope
This is the hardest paragraph on the page and it is the most useful one.
In much of West and East Africa, in Muslim families, and in many other traditions, burial happens within a few days. Not a fortnight. Days. Meanwhile even the fastest visa route has to gather documents, reach an appointment, and wait for a decision.
Look at where those two bars sit. This is not pessimism, it is the shape of the problem, and seeing it on day one is far kinder than discovering it on day five having spent money you needed for something else.
Where the emergency is an illness rather than a death, the picture is often better, because you may have days or weeks rather than hours — and that is exactly when moving fast is worth everything. Where it is a burial in three days and you are starting from no appointment, be very careful about who you pay in the next forty-eight hours.
What genuinely moves, and what only feels like it does
Four things work. Three do not, and people spend most of their week on those three.
This is the only lever that reliably moves the decision, and it is a government product rather than a favour. The UK, for example, publishes three speeds: super priority aiming for the end of the next working day, priority within five working days, and everything else within fifteen. Similar paid tiers exist elsewhere under different names. It has to be bought as part of the application, is not always available at every centre, and it compresses the decision — not the appointment.
Speed is bought from the government, in public, at a published price. It is never bought from a person.
The order to do things in today
If you do nothing else on this page, do these in this sequence.
Get the document that establishes the emergency first — the hospital letter or the death certificate or the burial notice. Everything else depends on it and it is usually the slowest thing to obtain, because it comes from a family in the middle of a crisis. Ask for it in the first hour, not the second day.
Then look at what appointments genuinely exist, including in other cities. People fixate on their nearest centre and lose days to it when a flight to another city with an available slot would have been faster and cheaper than waiting.
Then buy the fastest processing tier that is offered, at the point of application, because in most systems it cannot be added afterwards. And submit a file that would have been approved on an ordinary Tuesday, because urgency does not lower the bar — it only shortens the queue.
If you are not going to make it
Sometimes the arithmetic does not work, and somebody should say so rather than let you find out by missing it.
If the burial is on Friday and you are starting from nothing on Wednesday, you are very unlikely to be there. What you can still do is go afterwards. Many families hold a second gathering, a memorial or a formal mourning period weeks later, and a visa applied for calmly over three weeks, with a proper file, is far more likely to be granted than one rushed into a refusal now.
That matters practically, not just emotionally. A refusal obtained this week does not disappear when the funeral is over. It attaches to you, and it will make the application you make in November harder than it needed to be. Losing the funeral is a grief. Losing the funeral and acquiring a refusal is a grief plus a problem.
What we do in these
We tell you within a day whether it is realistic, and we say the uncomfortable version out loud. That is the most valuable thing anyone can give you this week, and it is the thing you will not be offered by someone who wants the fee.
If it is realistic, we move immediately: the emergency request written properly with the right evidence attached, appointments checked across every centre rather than the obvious one, the fastest processing selected at the point it can still be selected, and the ordinary file built correctly alongside it so speed does not come at the cost of a refusal.
And if it is not realistic, we will tell you that too, and help you plan the trip you can actually make.
Tell us the dates. We will tell you today whether it is possible.
Straight answer, quickly, including when the answer is no.
Continue Reading
The Schengen Visas You Can File Without an Appointment
Where a booked slot is not required at all.
One Refusal Follows You
Why a rushed application is more expensive than it looks.
Visa Scams and How to Spot Them
What gets sold to people at their most desperate.