Scheduling an appointment at the London consulate via the website is almost a “lottery”, which frustrates many Portuguese people who have been unable to renew their personal document for months.
Portugal Digital with Luza
Photo: Marcos Santos / USP Images
The online appointment platform of the Portal das Comunidades Portuguesas is currently the only way to obtain a vacancy for the issuance or renewal of a citizen’s card and passport, as the options for booking by phone or email have been discontinued.
To access, enter your personal data or use a digital mobile key, but most of the time users face the message “Currently there are no vacancies, try again later”.
“There were never any vacancies. I had to log into the site every day to try to score. It was a game of luck,” Rita Jose complained to the Lusa agency from Chippenham, 175 kilometers west of London.
After two months of trying, this kindergarten teacher was able to schedule a passport renewal six months later, and it took her a week to see her daughter a month later.
“Accessing the online system is not difficult, the problem is the vacancies”, he lamented.
Other guys have had less successful experiences, like Mariana Chaves, a pastry chef in Cornwall, southwest England, who spent more than a year trying to get an appointment to renew her passport.
Frustrated, she wrote an email to the Consular Service Center (CAC), which responded with a link to an online planning platform.
Bearing in mind that it takes about five hours to drive from Cornwall to London, others advised her to travel to Portugal as the journey would take about the same amount of time and would solve the problem quickly.
“That’s when I started researching on the internet and joined a Facebook group. One day someone wrote that there were vacancies and I booked it for November. The passport expired in August,” he told Lusa.
The person responsible for the warning is Rosanna Alves, an executive manager in London, who lived there for six years and tried religiously every day for five months, including weekends.
“I tried once on a Friday morning at 11:00 and I was surprised because instead of the message that there were no vacancies, I had a series of options. I decided to share to help people in the same situation,” he explained to Lusa.
“It’s very easy, two clicks” to tag, he admits, but “you have to be very diligent”.
Isabel Silva and Luciana Breda were the beneficiaries of Rosanna’s gesture and were able to schedule the meetings they had been trying to do for months.
“I started a year ago. I stayed all day, tried at different times, and the message was always the same: “Try later”, said Isabel Silva, manager of a supermarket in London.
Luciana Breda, a cleaner in the same city, worries about the added difficulties for the elderly or those without computer skills.
In your case, your son’s passport has expired and he has not been able to take a vacation in Brazil for two years.
“It’s a lot of emotional exhaustion,” he admits.
London’s consulate clarified that appointments would continue to open for the next three months “on an almost daily basis, with periodic reinforcements for closer dates” if the cancellation is announced.
Additionally, vacancies are available to work every Saturday morning from 9:00 to 13:00 until the end of the year.
Gisela Doria, from Norwich, central England, simply said she ended up using the consular stay in Great Yarmouth after trying “for months on end, at different times of the day”.
It’s the same at the Manchester consulate, said Bruna Amaral, who lives in Liverpool and needs an appointment to renew her autistic sister’s passport.
For the past two months, she had made a daily routine of scheduling a meeting before going to work, at lunchtime and at the end of the day, after coming home — but so far she couldn’t.
Interestingly, when accessing the site, options arise to visit other consulates in the Republic of Ireland, such as London or Dublin, which have vacancies in October.
“Don’t even think I’m going to Dublin”, and he replied: “So many people are waiting, it’s sad”.
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