“I planned my 2019 Europe trip very loosely, and made almost every mistake I now tell people to avoid.” A friend put it to me in exactly those words.
He had applied for his Schengen visa through Switzerland, on the reasoning that the Swiss consulate favoured family travellers, went easier on a single traveller applying alongside relatives, and asked only the head of the family to show the finances. It worked. All three of them, he and his parents, were granted the visa, date to date, multiple entry.
Then the actual trip bent out of shape. He landed in Austria, spent barely any time in Switzerland, and left the Schengen Area from Norway. Plans had shifted right up to the final week, as they tend to. Some drift between the itinerary you submit and the trip you take is normal. His was not small. On the way out, a Schengen immigration officer pulled him aside and grilled him, and by his own account he was let through more on grace than on the strength of his paperwork.
His visa was genuine and his trip was real. But the gap between the country he applied through and the journey he actually made turned a routine exit into an interrogation. That gap is the subject of this piece. The strategy behind it, choosing a consulate for its reputation rather than for where you are going, is one of the most confidently repeated tips in Indian travel circles, and it has quietly stopped working. Here is why the “easiest embassy” approach now tends to end badly.
What visa shopping actually means
Visa shopping is choosing which consulate to apply through based on its reputation for leniency rather than on where you are actually going. The traveller picks the embassy thought to have the softest checks, books a token night there to justify it, and files, hoping to slip through an easier door into the whole Schengen Area.
The logic is understandable. Every Schengen visa grants the same access, so on paper it should not matter who issues yours. The problem is that the rule deciding where you must apply does not care about access. It cares about your itinerary, and it is not a suggestion.
The rule that defeats the strategy
Schengen has a clear test for where you apply, called the main destination rule. You apply to the consulate of the country where you will spend the most nights. If two countries are tied and no single main destination can be established, you apply to the country where you will first enter the Schengen Area. This is set out in the EU Visa Code and repeated in the consulates’ own common information sheet for Indian applicants, so there is no grey area to exploit.
Take a realistic case. You are planning twelve days across France, Spain, and Portugal, with most of your nights genuinely in France. A well-meaning agent tells you Portugal approves Indian applicants more easily, so you apply through Lisbon and quietly pad the Portugal leg with a couple of extra hotel nights on paper to make it look like your main destination. On the surface the numbers now line up. Underneath, they do not. Your flights arrive in and depart from Paris, your longer bookings and internal train tickets cluster in France, and the Lisbon nights sit there looking bolted on. That gap between the destination you have declared and the trip you have actually planned is exactly what a visa officer is trained to spot, and padded bookings in the “easy” country make the engineering more obvious, not less.
The uncomfortable part: the “easy” consulates are often the hardest
Here is where the old advice ages badly. The smaller consulates people assume are soft touches are, for Indian applicants, frequently the toughest in the whole bloc.
The most recent full consular breakdown from the European Commission, covering 2024, makes the point plainly. Across all nationalities, Malta refused the highest share of applications at about 38 percent, followed by Estonia, Belgium, Slovenia, and Sweden, all above 24 percent. For Indian applicants the picture is sharper still. Slovenia did not issue roughly 46 percent of Indian applications, Bulgaria around 37 percent, Greece about 33 percent, with Malta and Estonia both above 30 percent. These are exactly the sort of lesser-known consulates that get whispered about as easy options.
Now set that against the countries everyone is told to avoid. Germany handled the largest volume of Indian applications, more than 150,000 of them, and refused only about 10 percent. On this data an Indian applicant with the same paperwork could face single-digit odds of refusal in one country and close to one-in-two in another, decided by nothing more than where they applied. The gap is enormous, and it runs opposite to the folk wisdom. The “strict” big country is often the safer bet. The “easy” small one is where applications quietly go to die.
One honest caveat belongs here. A refusal rate is not a pure difficulty score. It also reflects who applies and how well documented they are, so a high figure is a warning sign rather than a verdict on a single case. Even read cautiously, though, the numbers demolish the idea that obscure consulates are the soft path.
What happens when it goes wrong
A refusal is not a neutral setback you can quietly retry. It is expensive and it follows you.
You lose the visa fee, which is not refundable. You often lose non-refundable bookings made to prop up the application. Indian media covering the 2025 refusal wave put the combined cost to applicants in fees and lost bookings at somewhere between roughly 136 and 154 crore rupees, depending on the outlet, which tells you the true figure is large and imprecise rather than settled. Worse, a refusal for applying at the wrong consulate does not let you simply resubmit there. You start again at the correct consulate, from zero, now carrying a fresh rejection on your record.
And that record matters more than it used to. Germany, by some reports, has withdrawn the informal appeal route it once offered Indian applicants, which would make a refusal harder to talk your way back from. Either way, each rejection is a mark the next officer can see, and it makes every future application a little heavier to lift.
Approval is not the finish line either. My friend’s Swiss visa was granted without a hitch, and the bill came later, at the border, in the form of an exit interview he barely talked his way out of. A visa gets you the sticker. It does not excuse your actual trip from matching the story you told to earn it.
The long game you are quietly sabotaging
There is a bigger reason to drop the habit, and it points to where Schengen policy is heading. The system is moving toward rewarding consistency. Under the cascade regime being rolled out for Indian nationals, a clean and coherent travel history is what unlocks two-year and eventually five-year multiple-entry visas. The whole idea is that the consulate learns to trust a pattern.
Visa shopping is the enemy of that pattern. Switching which country you apply through, building trips around technicalities instead of real plans, and collecting the odd refusal along the way is the opposite of the steady record that earns long validity. You might spare yourself a little imagined friction on one application while forfeiting years of easier travel later. It is a poor trade.
What to do instead
The honest strategy is also the simpler one. Decide where you are genuinely going, then apply where the rule sends you.
Work out your main destination by counting nights, not by convenience. If Italy is where most of your trip happens, apply through Italy, even if you have heard its consulate is demanding. Build an itinerary that actually holds together, with flights, hotels, and internal travel that tell one coherent story. Enter and, ideally, leave through the country that issued your visa, which settles any question about your main destination before it can be raised. Then put your effort into the parts of the application that truly move the needle: clear finances, proof of ties to India, and a plan that reads as real.
The strength of your application is the thing you control. The consulate you must apply through is fixed by your itinerary, not chosen from a menu. Trying to game the second is a distraction from improving the first, and the recent numbers suggest it is a distraction that increasingly ends in a refusal.
The shortcut everyone still recommends has quietly become the long way round. The travellers collecting clean approvals are not the ones who found a clever door. They are the ones who walked through the right one with their paperwork in order.
Choosing the right consulate is less about strategy and more about planning the trip honestly, and that is where most applications quietly go wrong. At Jaunt Planners we build Europe itineraries that hold together on paper and on the ground: the correct issuing country, a route that justifies your stay, and entry and exit points that leave no question about your main destination. If a clean approval matters to you, the itinerary is the place to start.
