Your Fingerprints Are in Their System. Should You Be Worried?
A travel professional's take on the VFS Global investigation — and what needs to change.
Last week, The Indian Express — in collaboration with Lighthouse Reports and media partners across 11 countries including Der Spiegel and Le Monde — published a damning investigation into VFS Global, the company that processes Schengen visa applications for over a million Indians every year.
I've been in the travel industry for years. I work with VFS centres regularly. And honestly? None of it surprised me. What surprised me is that it took this long to become front-page news.
What the investigation actually found
Let me break this down in plain terms, because the details matter. European inspection reports spanning 2020 to 2025 — obtained through 40+ Freedom of Information requests — flagged the following at VFS operations in India:
- Applicants' biometric and personal data stored on unencrypted discs during transport
- Applicant data remaining accessible in VFS's New Delhi system for over a month — when the Schengen visa code requires deletion within seven days
- Widespread black-marketing of appointment slots
- "Value-added" services — lounges, courier, SMS alerts — presented in ways that made them appear mandatory, not optional. In India, these services reportedly carry pre-tax margins of up to 70%
- A pattern across every EU country that flagged issues: short-term improvement, then relapse
New Delhi was specifically identified as the visa application centre with the highest concentration of processing errors. A 20-member EU delegation visited India to address these issues directly with VFS management.
Let's talk about what this actually means for Indian travellers
More than one million Indians apply for Schengen visas annually. That number has more than doubled since the pandemic. These are people saving up for dream holidays, planning honeymoons, sending kids to study abroad, attending family events in Europe.
Every single one of them has handed VFS their passport, their biometric data, their bank statements, their travel history.
They trusted the process because they had no choice. VFS isn't an option — it's the only gateway.
And that monopoly on access is precisely why accountability matters so much here. When there's no alternative, there's no market pressure to improve. The only pressure that works is regulatory — and that's been failing too.
VFS's response? "We conduct 10,000 audits a year."
That was essentially their defence. Rigorous oversight. Continuous compliance. Structured remediation plans.
But the inspection reports tell a different story. Every time an issue was raised, there was a temporary improvement — followed by relapse. The monitors blamed absent or under-equipped middle management. That's not a compliance problem. That's a culture problem.
You can conduct 10,000 audits and still have a culture that doesn't take those audits seriously.
What needs to change — and who needs to push for it
The European Commission has already signalled a shift. Its recently adopted EU Visa Policy Strategy acknowledged that growing reliance on external service providers "calls for improved quality control and monitoring." That's a start. But signals aren't enough.
Here's what I believe needs to happen:
- Mandatory data transparency for applicants. If your data is being stored beyond the legally permitted period, you should know. VFS should be required to notify applicants of any data retention beyond the Schengen code's timeline.
- Genuine optionality on value-added services. If something is optional, it must be presented as optional — clearly, in the applicant's language, at every stage of the booking process. Not buried. Not pre-ticked. Not implied.
- Real consequences for recurring failures. Temporary improvement followed by relapse should disqualify a provider from renewal of contracts, not just trigger another "remediation plan." The EU's willingness to keep renewing VFS contracts despite repeated findings is the structural problem nobody wants to talk about.
- An alternative. The fact that VFS operates as the sole gateway in most markets is itself a risk. Competition — or at minimum, a credible public alternative — would change the incentive structure entirely.
A word to fellow travel professionals
We are often the people our clients call when the VFS appointment slot disappears, when their data is wrong in the system, when they've been charged for a service they didn't ask for.
We know this is broken. We've navigated around it, worked with it, sometimes been complicit in it by not saying anything louder.
I think this investigation is an opportunity to say something — not just to our clients, but to the regulators, the embassies, and the policymakers who continue to outsource a sovereign function to a private company with 70% margins and apparently optional accountability.
Our clients trust us to get them to the destination. Part of that job is making sure the system they depend on is worthy of that trust. Right now, it isn't.
I'm Shashank Arora, a travel consultant specialising in luxury and offbeat holidays across Europe and Asia. If you're planning a trip and want someone who handles the complexity — including the bits that don't make the news — I'd love to help.
