Three of you were approved. One of you was not.

Almost every family we speak to in this position says the same thing first: how is that even possible? We applied together. Same money, same trip, same house, same everything.

Because you were never assessed together. You submitted together. Each of you was then read as a separate person with separate reasons to come back, and one of you did not have enough of them.

It is usually the same person

There is a pattern to who gets refused out of a family, and once you see it, it stops being mysterious.

It is the teenager who has just finished school and has not started anything else — no job, no enrolment, no dependants, nothing on paper holding him anywhere. It is the adult son or daughter in their twenties who was included because they are family, but who is legally an adult with none of the ties the parents have. It is the wife who does not work outside the home, so the file has nothing to say about her at all except that she is married to you.

The parents look solid. The children under twelve are obviously going home with their parents. And somewhere in the middle sits one person whose own page is nearly empty.

Now the hard part: do you go?

This is the conversation nobody prepares for, and it is worse than the refusal itself.

Some families travel and leave him behind, and spend the whole holiday not enjoying it. Some cancel and lose most of what they paid. Some send everyone except one parent, who stays home with him. There is no correct answer here and anyone who tells you otherwise is not being honest — it depends on the child, on what is refundable, on whether this is a holiday or a wedding or a funeral.

What we would say is this: think carefully before rushing a fresh application into the nine days you have left. A hurried second attempt with nothing new in it usually produces a second refusal, and then he is carrying two of them into every application he makes for the rest of his life. Losing a holiday is expensive. That is more expensive.

How this gets avoided

By building a page for every single person before anything is submitted, and being honest about which one is thin.

For the teenager between school and university, that means a letter from the school or the place he has been accepted, confirming he is expected back and when. For the adult child, it means their own employment or study evidence rather than a place on their father’s application. For the wife who runs the household, it means the file saying something about her life — property in her name, the children in local schools, whatever is genuinely true and anchoring.

None of this is difficult. It is just that families submit as a family, so nobody thinks to ask what the weakest page looks like on its own. We ask that before anything is filed, and we tell you which name we are worried about while there is still time to do something about it.

If your son is the one whose page is nearly empty, you should hear that from us in week one — not from an envelope, nine days before the flight, with him standing next to you.