Thursday, August 13, 2009

More Chinese Visas

I was sending a travel agent in China our passport/visa information and noticed that the Chinese visas were numbered sequentially. Since my dad got his a few days later than us, I have numbers from applications submitted on Monday and a number from a one-day visa issued the same week on Thursday. To be conservative, I assumed that the Monday visas were processed right away and that all visa numbers in between were issued out of the Los Angeles office. Anyway, it works out that they issue about 1500 visas (conservative estimate) per week. Once again, assuming that most to all the visas are for US citizens, that's ~$150k per week on visa fees just for the Los Angeles office; there are Chinese consulates in several US cities.

For that much money, you figure they could afford air conditioning in the middle of summer and hire more customer service (!) reps.

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