CKGS Application Centre

This review is for tourist visa we applied through CKGS Houston. I have applied for tourist visa along with my wife and my son. It seems that my application is lost. It never crossed verification process. It has been more than 3 weeks but the application is stuck on verification process. I tried calling them and after so many tries I was able to connect to a customer service guy. The guy told me that the status has not been updated and he is escalating the case. Again no communication for many days. I keep calling them but their phone is always busy. I am stuck as my passport is with them otherwise I would apply for on arrival 30 days visa. Now I need to cancel my trip as I didn’t get my visa on time. The overall experience is so frustrating to say the least.

First off, I can’t believe how anyone could give this place more than 1 star, only if there was an option to not give any at all. This place HAS to be the WORST place I have EVER been to! staff is unprofessional, rude and not helpful at all. One person said to bring some additional papers and when you go back with those papers another staff member says that it’s not needed. When you get an appointment online it doesn’t mean shit because you have to grab a ticket and wait as a walk in! Oh and save your time trying to contact them, because all you’ll be hearing for 30 minutes is «your expected wait time is less than 10 minutes, your expected wait time is less than 20 minutes»
–_​– oh yes. instead of the wait time decreasing it increases. Anyways I could go on and on about this place, but I don’t want to waste anymore time over it than I already have! Good luck to anyone who has to go there!

There are many things I could say about how useless and shitty this entire OCI process is, but I guess since documentation runs the world so I’ll skip that part. The website is terrible, and please for the love of God please fix your automated phone message. I don’t mind being put on hold, but it is torture to hear every 5 SECONDS (yes I timed it) a status on wait time. NOWHERE on the website does it tell you the most important things like: 1) We take a two hour long lunch break from 2pm-​4pm because we like to pretend that we’re in Italty and love siestas 2) OCI matchup time is from 9am-​11am ONLY (even though it takes 5 minutes to process the crap 3) We don’t honor appointment times, we just have that for show since we like to copy the world. It still is a first– come first-​served basis only. Oh and there is no listed houston office number to call. It’s only NY and some other state that I don’t care to remember. SHOCKINGLY enough, the people I have had to deal with were pretty nice. They were down to earth and GASP. normal. But anyway, there’s plenty of street parking ($ 2.00/hour) so please don’t park for $ 14 in the building. That being said, if you do have to deal with this place, I wish everybody the best of luck, because TRULY there are worst places out there.

This is an updated review (See my original review below). So, just few hours after I wrote an email to the Consul General of India in Houston complaining about CKGS, they suddenly found my package. I got an email from the Unit Manager of CKGS Houston who had got my email fwded from the Consul general. The reason given to me was that CKGS was having issues/​problems with USPS (Wonder why is this so. Never heard anyone having any problem with USPS). According to them, USPS had delivered my package in a wrong mailbox not meant for CKGS and that 103 packages in total were found in the wrong mailbox. Now, I don’t know if I should believe this story but I am glad that they finally found my package and started the process! Finger crossed till I receive the passport with the visa stamp.
Few lessons learned — 1. Always send passport through fedex brought through CKGS as they recommend it (few bucks extra) and have a tie up with them. However, I have no problems with USPS.
2. Complain to all possible authorities as you can.
3. Get in touch with people who have had similar issues or issues with CKGS (I got in touch with lot of people on Unilocal who had faced problems with CKGS). So thank you Unilocal

This is the worst company I have ever dealt with. I never write reviews, even when I have a bad experience, but this I just could not keep quiet about. I am a U.S. citizen by birth and my parents were born in India, but have been U.S. citizens for 20+ years. We visit India almost every year and have never had any issues with the Visa process until now. The CKGS website is crap, half the links do not work. If you call customer care, each employee will tell you a different story, no one knows what they are doing. How could they? You talk to a call center in India, not to anyone in the States. They are unwilling to cooperate and are EXTREMELY unorganized. They have lost countless documents that I have submitted and resubmitted. They asked for my parents’ birth certificates, naturalization forms, college degrees, renunciation letters, utility bill, my pay stub, my passport, passport-​sized photos, my drivers license, my birth certificate, and my degree – ALL FOR JUST A TOURIST VISA. Ridiculous. I should not have to go through hell just to visit my grandmother for only two weeks. And now? They tell me LESS THAN A WEEK BEFORE I LEAVE FOR INDIA that my application, which has been sitting with them for 2 months, for which I got an email saying the application is complete, is now suddenly missing documents! They have ruined my whole trip, wasted my time, and thousands of dollars. This is absolutely unacceptable.

Website is a piece of crap and it takes forever to do anything online!!! I had to keep re-​trying to submit the application for over an hour because it kept giving errors. I got through to them via phone (after a long time as well) and was told to try again later because there was «probably too much traffic on the page». I’ve been having the same issues every day for the past 3 days despite having tried different browsers. Indian Government should be ashamed to let such an incompetent organization represent them at an international level.

This is the WORST company to deal with. I had no idea what was happening with the process, and when I called to get an update they couldn’t tell me a thing. Finally after my VISA was processed, it was supposed to ship within 24 hours. Now it was been 3 days and it still hasn’t shipped and now it’s the weekend. After throwing a fit, I finally spoke to the manager who guaranteed me it would be sent out ASAP-​nope. At this point I just want my passport back! DO NOT USE THIS COMANY! TERRIBLE.

Hold time for their call center is anywhere between 20 mins to 45 mins… seriously!!!

They received my Indian Visa application on the 1^st of July and asked me to send additional documents on the 3^rd. I thought everything was being taken care of at a very good speed. They received the additional documents on the 8^th. Today is 28^th and I haven’t received my Visa nor an accurate update. I have been calling them every 2 or 3 days and every time the customer care guys give me different information. This is very frustrating. As I write this review, I am on on the phone for an hour now. I hope to end this process soon. What a nightmare.