Where to apply when there is no embassy

Guides to moving abroad tell you what a route requires. They rarely tell you where to hand in the form. For a reader in London or Toronto that omission costs nothing, because the embassy is a bus ride away. For a reader in N'Djamena or Ouagadougou it is frequently the single fact that decides whether a route is real.

Diplomatic presence is not geography and it is not politics you can predict. A destination may keep an embassy in a neighbouring country and none in yours; it may keep an embassy in yours that does not take visa applications; it may route your application to a third country entirely. None of that is visible from the route's own requirements page, which is written as though everybody lives next door to a consulate.

We hold reach verdicts for seventy-one destinations against twenty-six origin countries — every combination recorded as either reachable or not, with a sentence saying what the arrangement is, the month it was recorded, and the page it came from. That is a little under two thousand pairs, and as far as we know nobody else publishes it.

Two examples, rendered live from the same table the country pages read:

The difference between those two cards is the difference between a plan and a plane ticket, and it is knowable before you start.

Not as far as we would like yet, and the pages say so on every card that has not been re-checked. The bulk of this dataset was assembled from a secondary source, and only a minority of pairs currently cite the destination's own missions directory.

That is disclosed rather than smoothed over because the alternative — presenting a secondary-sourced sentence in the same visual language as a government-sourced one — is precisely the thing this product exists not to do. We are re-sourcing them destination by destination, and a card changes badge automatically the moment its destination is done.

In the meantime, treat a reach verdict as a strong hint and confirm it on the linked page before you book anything. That is true of any fact on any website; it is more true of one whose source we have already told you is secondary.

Every one of the twenty-six origin countries has its own page listing which destinations it can reach, which it cannot, where the applications go instead, and how many routes sit behind each. They are linked from the destinations directory, and they are the fastest way to turn a long list of interesting routes into a short list of reachable ones.