Editorial policy
How this site decides what to publish
Visa guidance is consequential: a wrong figure costs someone a refused application, a forfeited fee and sometimes a trip they had already paid for. These are the rules Top Visa Services works under, written down so you can hold us to them.
1. Primary sources, or nothing
A source is an EU institution or a member state's own publication. Another guide is not a source. A news article about a regulation is not a source. An aggregator that cites an aggregator is definitely not a source.
Every rule and every figure on this site names where it came from and the date a person read it there. If we have not read it at source, the page says so rather than borrowing someone else's confidence.
2. Nothing regulated is published until it is re-checked
Regulated facts — launch dates, thresholds, deadlines, published amounts — are held in one file with a verification status each. A page that depends on an unverified fact stays out of the search index automatically, regardless of how finished the prose is. The check is not a habit we intend to keep; it is a condition of publication that we cannot bypass by forgetting.
This exists because of a specific failure we watched happen. When the EU withdrew a previously advertised ETIAS launch target, roughly half the pages ranking for that query went on presenting it as confirmed — not because the correction was hard to find, but because nothing in those sites ever asked the question again.
3. We do not generate pages at scale
29 destinations × 5 visa types × 5 passports is 725 combinations before residence is even considered, and every one of them is something a person types into a search box. It would be straightforward to generate a URL for each.
We do not, and will not. Those pages would be assembled rather than written, they would be indistinguishable from each other, and on a YMYL topic they would be confidently wrong at scale — which is precisely what Google's scaled content abuse policy exists to catch. Instead, each axis is a flat set of hand-written pages, and combinations are answered by filtering a table inside a page. A destination page carries a table of visa types; a passport page carries a table of destinations. You get your specific combination in one interaction, and every page on this site is one a person actually wrote.
4. Named accountability
Pages identify the responsible publisher. Individual authors and reviewers are named only when their contribution and publishable details are confirmed. We will not invent a byline or a credential. An unnamed review is not presented as publicly attributable expert approval. See the about page for our current disclosures.
5. No predictions, no reassurance
Nobody can tell you whether your application will be approved. A consular officer decides on your individual file, and approval-rate statistics describe populations rather than people. Where the honest answer is unfavourable — that a particular passport attracts heavier scrutiny, that an appeal is usually slower than reapplying — we say so rather than softening it.
6. The tools stay free and un-gated
The calculator and the consulate finder require no account, no email and no payment, and they run entirely in your browser, so nothing you enter about your travel history or your finances is transmitted to us or anyone else. That is a permanent commitment, not an introductory offer.
7. How we make money, and what we will not do for it
Top Visa Services is funded by advertising and by affiliate arrangements with travel services — the kind of thing a traveller needs anyway, such as insurance or bookings. Where a link earns us a commission it is disclosed on the page carrying it.
What that never buys: placement in guidance, a softened assessment, or a recommendation to use a paid service where the free government route is the right answer. We will not charge for lodging applications, and we will not sell a service that duplicates a government process at a markup — that business model is the reason this category is untrustworthy, and it is a substantial part of why there is room for this site at all.
8. Corrections
Tell us what is wrong and we will fix it and date the fix on the page. Where a correction changes what a reader should do, we say what changed rather than editing quietly. Contact us here.