Alex Aitcheson - UK to NZ
Why use an Immigration Officer, these forms are long-winded but logical… well that was our thoughts too!
Are you sitting comfortably, let’s begin:
So, we spent a long time working through the NZ online visa version tool, researching what was best for our situation and duly filling out all the forms. We paid the dee and submitted our expression of interest… and nothing, nothing at all for months. Speaking to a colleague we discovered that there was another visa that we could apply for that should give us what we needed. Feeling disgruntled we jumped through these hoops, getting frustrated that this “new/other” visa did not appear on the website as described. Filled out the forms, paid more money and waited.
Ohhh, an invitation to proceed came through, we need medicals, ok, where do we go and what do we do (this is not as easy as you might think, we were located on the Isle of Man at the time and the nearest site was Manchester! So flights, hotels and more costs and we obtained our eMedical info which was sent to our Immigration Officer… nothing, yep nothing came back. We waited weeks, tried calling (left voicemails as you can’t speak to anyone), emailed both the officer and the general immigration email address and still, we got no further!
At this point, we were, quite frankly, really disheartened about the whole situation thinking that we may end up missing our application window meaning we would have to start all over again. In an unrelated set of circumstances (actually a discussion about motorbikes on a forum) Andy at O’Dell Immigration was suggested to us. With nothing to lose we fired off an email.
How to express our gratitude without sounding overly gushing or sickly-sweet, was not easy really, speaking to Andy for the first time instantly put us at ease, he explained what he and his team can do for us, how they have direct access to the NZ Immigration Officers and can expedite actions for us, and also operating in the NZ timezone meant that we did not have to wait almost 24hrs for each action to be responded to.
Long story short, Immigration required a number of questions answered that we were unaware of and had it not been for O’Dell Immigration Services we more than likely would have missed out on this visa application window.
Andy did not stop here, he took the time to fully understand our longer-term aims and suggested a couple of other visas to apply for concurrently to enable us to get these processes started sooner. Having up-to-date information on the planned immigration changes in the pipeline meant that he could help guide us through the next steps in an efficient and friendly manner.
The process from the point we submitted our first visa application to the point we engaged was 6 months (with no movement in our visa), and from the point that O’Dell Immigration was engaged to the point we received our first visa approval was 4 weeks! Without O’Dell Immigration and Andy’s assistance, we would not have known about all the options available and would have probably still been waiting for NZ Immigration to approve our original application!
So here we are, now relocated to New Zealand, it is an amazing country and people and we cannot thank Andy and O’Dell Immigration enough for helping us to make our dreams come true.
You don’t have to take my word for it, if you are thinking about relocation (even temporarily) to New Zealand, give O’Dell Immigration a call/email. Find out for yourselves just how valuable their services are for you!