Greece Tourist Visa

Santorini for your honeymoon, and a visa that arrives in time

You have booked the wedding date. Now you are looking at Santorini sunsets and blue-domed churches on your phone. Or the family wants Athens and a Crete beach in the school holidays. Greece is one of the most requested Schengen countries for Indian couples and families, and that popularity brings one specific problem: getting an appointment in the busy months.

This page explains the Greek short-stay visa in simple words, and then the mistakes we see in Indian files for Greece.

The basic rules

Greece is part of the Schengen area. The short-stay visa (type C) gives you up to 90 days in any 180-day period. The days count across all Schengen countries, so a Greece-plus-Italy trip uses days from the same allowance.

Greece must be your main destination for you to apply to Greece. Main destination means the most nights. If you plan five nights in Athens and five in Rome, the country you fly into first is where you apply. We check your itinerary against this rule at the start.

Money and time

The visa fee is €90 for adults. Children between 6 and 11 pay €45. Children under 6 pay nothing. The VFS service fee is extra and paid in rupees. Our fee calculator totals it for your group.

You may lodge the file up to six months ahead and must lodge it no later than 15 days before departure. The consulate's normal decision time is 15 calendar days. It can stretch to 45 days if the officer needs more papers or the season is heavy. For a honeymoon with a fixed wedding date, we tell couples to apply as early as the six-month window allows.

Greece uses VFS Global centres in Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi. Delhi is the usual choice from Punjab. Between May and July, slots go within hours of release. Our Greece appointment tracker shows what is open right now. Do not book non-refundable flights before you have a visa appointment.

What the officer wants to see

A Greek visitor file has the same skeleton as any Schengen file, with a few Greek-specific points:

• Passport with at least three months validity beyond your exit date and two blank pages.
• Completed Schengen form and recent photos.
• Return flights and, for island trips, the ferry or domestic flight between islands.
• Hotel confirmations for every night. For Santorini, Mykonos or Crete, island hotels should be named and dated in the file, not just Athens.
• Travel medical insurance of at least €30,000, valid across the whole Schengen area.
• Six months of bank statements, salary slips or business papers.
• Proof you will return: employer leave letter, property, family, running business.
• For honeymoons, the wedding card or marriage certificate helps explain the trip.

We prepare and check everything. Your single task is to visit the VFS centre for biometrics (fingerprints and photo) and hand over the file and passport.

Where files from India go wrong for Greece

Only Athens is booked. Couples upload an Athens hotel and leave the islands "to be decided". The officer sees an eight-day trip with three nights accounted for. Book every night, even if the booking can be cancelled later.

Ferry gaps. A file that shows a hotel in Athens on Monday and a hotel in Santorini on Tuesday but no way of getting between them raises a question. Add the ferry or flight.

Peak-season timing. Files lodged in late May for a mid-June wedding trip run straight into the busiest period. If the consulate takes 30 days, the trip is lost.

New couples with new bank accounts. A joint account opened last month with a large gift deposit reads as unexplained funds. We show each partner's own account history, and add a note for wedding gifts.

Greece as the "easy" option for a wider Europe trip. Some agents say Greece is quicker, so people apply there even when they will spend more time in France. That is a wrong-country refusal waiting to happen.

After a refusal

Greek refusals come on the standard Schengen form with 16 numbered grounds. Ground 10, "your intention to leave the territory could not be established", and ground 8 on purpose of stay are the ones we see most. Each ground is explained plainly on our Schengen refusal reasons page.

You can appeal in Greece or you can reapply. For time-sensitive trips like a honeymoon, reapplying with a stronger file is usually the practical route, because an appeal can take longer than the trip itself. We go through your refused file line by line, find what was missing or unclear, and build the new file so the same ground cannot be ticked twice.

Talk to us

On one call we settle: whether your dates leave enough room for processing, whether Greece is the right country for your route, what island bookings must be in the file, and how to present money for a newly married couple.

We are Lifeset Overseas, licensed by the Punjab government (Licence No. 849/DC/PTA/PLA/LC-3/2024), based in Patiala. Call or WhatsApp +91 91155 80911, Monday to Saturday, 9 AM to 7 PM. Share your wedding or travel date and we will tell you today whether it is workable.