Today it is almost impossible to find a person who has not been abroad. And even more so, those who do not know about the difficulties in processing documents associated with departure.

Rational people prefer to overpay a little to private visa centers for their services and in return receive a guaranteed high level of service and truly prompt processing of documents, rather than stand in queues at official consulates and representative offices.

Why open?

Today, the cost of obtaining visas to enter a neighboring country is about $100-150. And the farther and more “exotic” the country is, the higher the cost (up to $2,000 for a visa).

It means that The average bill of a regular visa center can range from $100 to $300 per client. Taking into account the margin of 15-35% and the volume of requests of 5-10 applications per day, we get a good profit with minimal costs for salaries of 1-2 managers and office rent of 10-15 m2.

In practice, this amounts to 150-200 thousand rubles of profit per month.

How to open?

If you are not familiar with the work of visa centers, then when you imagine the opening of your office, you probably see a mountain of papers, stationery and stacks of studied literature. Not the brightest prospect, is it?

And it can touch you with a high degree of probability if you open the center yourself. After all, developing an organization, especially in such an area, is always difficult alone.

You will need knowledge of the market, established connections with consulates and legal offices, experienced and responsible specialists who can work with documents, and so on. But there is a great alternative - making the organization part of a franchise.

If you open a franchisee company, many problems will disappear by themselves and a number of undoubted advantages will open up to you:

1. Many years of experience of the parent company: Required literature. Tips and tricks. Mentors who are ready to show the way and teach. They will guide you past all the pitfalls and lead you to success literally by the hand!
2. Opportunity to play the role of mediator: In most cases, you will not be required to apply for visas yourself. All that is required is to process and transmit applications along with packages of documents to the head office.
3. Ready queue of clients: Many franchises have their own customer base even in cities where they do not have offices. And this is your chance!
4. Prepared documentation: Templates and forms. Operating rules and KPIs. Practice-tested regulations and methods of interaction. Everything is ready to start!

Thus, all you have to do is find a suitable office and an employee who knows how to work with people. Moreover, it is possible to hire even people who have no experience in this field.

This is because the standard package of services under a franchising agreement includes staff training and adaptation assistance. And this opens up opportunities for entry into the niche for the widest possible range of people.

TOP visa center franchises in Russia

After dispelling the main myths about the difficulty of opening a center, let's look at what franchises operate on the Russian market and what they can offer you.

Financial resources required to start

The table above shows the costs of signing contracts with various franchises. In return, you receive comprehensive support, the right to use the brand and logo, corporate documentation and much more. But that's not all.

As you may have guessed, there will be other cost items when opening a visa center. These include:

• legal registration costs faces;
• costs of finding, renting and renovating an office;
• costs for the purchase of furniture, equipment, office supplies, etc.;
• costs of searching and hiring personnel;
• advertising costs.

The amount of costs for these items varies from 150 thousand rubles. (on average) up to 300 thousand rubles., depending on the region and the marketing policy being pursued. And according to statistics, it pays off within three months maximum. We recommend watching the video, which describes the principle of operation of visa centers:

We can conclude that the business is highly profitable and promising even for young and inexperienced entrepreneurs who want to start their own business without multimillion-dollar investments.

Whether to choose a visa center franchise is up to you to decide. We will do everything to provide you with the most useful and necessary information on any business topic of interest!

Today it is very difficult to find a person who would not fly abroad. The purpose of the trip can be any - recreation, study, shopping, business negotiations. However, in order to visit most countries, you must obtain a visa.

Many people know that in order to obtain permission to visit any country, you need to collect a lot of certificates, stand in long lines, and you can wait a very long time for a response from the Embassy. Therefore, recently companies have begun to open that, for a fee, are ready to process all documents for tourists.

Such companies are called visa centers; they are ready to offer the client a wide variety of services. Therefore, citizens prefer to pay the company rather than waste their free time.

Due to the popularity of such companies, many entrepreneurs are thinking about how to open their own visa center. However, this is not entirely simple: a businessman must have enormous knowledge in this field, have contractual relations with legal companies, with consuls, and a fairly large start-up capital is required. The easiest way is to open a representative office of an existing company that has status in the market and has its own clients.

Advantages of a franchise

An entrepreneur who wants to start a business from scratch in this area faces many problems, so a visa center franchise will make life much easier for a businessman.

Let us highlight the main advantages that an entrepreneur purchasing a franchise will receive:

Attention! Before opening a franchise visa center, you should analyze all the information in detail and study the reviews of customers who bought it.

To start earning money, a businessman needs to find an office and everything else is provided by the franchisor. Purchasing a franchise may also include the possibility of obtaining biometric visas.

Single visa center

The company also provides clients with a huge range of travel services. This includes booking hotels, tickets, processing visa documentation, and travel insurance.

The cost of purchasing a franchise is not cheap, and will range from 420 thousand rubles to 1 million 200 thousand rubles. The company provides small partners with a bonus when purchasing a project. In the first month, the franchisor brings more than 100 clients to the new office.

Business in Russia. Guides to starting a business in the regions.
700,000 entrepreneurs in the country trust us

* The calculations use average data for Russia

Traveling to another country for most residents of Russia begins with a long operation to obtain all the necessary permits and visas. The exception is the countries of the post-Soviet space, which are of little interest to tourists and people in general. Therefore, if you want to relax or simply visit another country, you must go through a tedious, long and wasteful procedure of interviews at embassies, collecting documents, waiting for a decision, etc. However, recently companies have appeared that offer their clients to resolve all issues regarding obtaining a visa, that is, to take care of the complete registration and submission of documents. Such companies are called visa centers, and they can work in different formats. Such an undertaking is quite promising, so it should definitely be considered as an opportunity to open your own business, especially given the increasing desire of Russians to leave their precious homeland, at least for a while.

Professional kit for creating business ideas

Trending product 2019..

An interesting feature of this business is that it is more relevant in not too large cities (but not towns or villages, of course), because in megacities there are often embassies that a person can contact on his own, and he will go to the visa center only for receiving advice or assistance in completing paperwork, and transferring documents will not be his main goal. However, even in some cities with more than one million inhabitants there are no embassies or representative offices of almost any country, and a person who decides to travel abroad is forced to contact the embassy in Moscow or another locality. Sometimes the nearest embassy is located more than one thousand kilometers away. There is no opportunity to go there, so the person comes to the visa center, which independently transfers the documents (and we remind you that they can almost never be transferred electronically, only originals).

A visa center is a simple intermediary, an outsourcer to some extent, but it in no way makes any decisions, does not issue permits, and in general cannot actually give a guarantee for the successful result of its activities. Currently, the market is not yet oversaturated with supply, and given that even in relatively small cities people tend to go abroad, such a business can be relevant almost everywhere. But especially in rich regions where people can afford vacations in other countries.

Assessing the market, one can understand that significant competition will come from travel agencies, because their line of work offers clients visas. However, travel agencies can be both competitors and consumers, because not every such company has the desire to deal with this issue. And not only desire, but also opportunity. As was said at the beginning, a visa center is also an outsourcing company, so it is easier for a travel agency to order visas through a specialized service, rather than work in this direction independently, so if you establish cooperation with travel companies, you can receive a sufficient volume of orders, even without conducting a full-scale campaign to attract clients.

As for other visa centers (potential competitors), here you can safely work in the same territory without interfering with each other. The fact is that a general visa center is opened quite rarely, because it is more expedient to open a company that specializes in issuing visas to a specific country or at least one region (Europe, the Caribbean archipelago, etc.). In this case, you can concentrate on working only with a specific embassy, ​​establish relationships, and build your own work scheme. It is quite difficult to cover all countries at once; each specific state has its own entry conditions. Therefore, if there are visa centers in the region, for example, from China, France and Spain, then you can open your own to help you fly to Germany or the USA. By the way, you also need to choose a country very carefully, because the easiest way to get to many countries is only on a tourist package (that’s why it is so important to cooperate with travel agencies), some are almost impossible to get to unless there are special conditions (such as sick relatives or a business trip) . For example, visiting the USA simply at will is much more difficult than Germany, and you need to know this.

To start working, you need to register as a business entity. Since the activity will be intermediary, no licenses or special permits will be required. However, there are some global companies (for example, VFS), cooperation with which can greatly help in your work, but at the same time, the partner can put forward his own demands on the company that has decided to enter into cooperation. From a legal point of view, you can even register as an individual entrepreneur; if there is a need to register a legal entity, then the preferred form is a limited liability company. This will allow you to take advantage of a simplified taxation system, which involves deductions to the state of no more than 6% of income or 15% of operating profit. The activity falls under the definition (OKPD 2) 96.09 Other personal services not included in other groups. It must be said that in such a business it is not even some special permits and licenses that are important, but the ability to find the necessary connections and negotiate with people, to have experience in negotiations. By the way, many visa centers approach their work precisely as an intermediary, that is, they in no way strive to develop service and advisory services. And this can be to the advantage of a more progressive entrepreneur.

Next you need to find a place for your work. And here you need to decide exactly the format of your work. Some visa centers open as a small office with two smiling employees who collect documents and mail them to the embassy. All. The client pays, in fact, only for checking and filling out documents. It is clear that not every country is ready to accept as a guest a person who sent them documents by mail; in many cases, an interview is held with those wishing to obtain a license (and the visa center here is practically powerless and becomes unnecessary). That is, such small visa centers work for a small fee and can only help when flying to a country with a simple visa regime.

Ready ideas for your business

But a full-fledged visa center that operates at full capacity must have a fairly spacious premises. Firstly, there will be employees here who constantly check information, contact representative offices and embassies, work with the database; in general, there may be enough work here if you want to offer clients a full-fledged service with support for the website and phone calls. And secondly, a good visa center has its own call center. However, this service can be outsourced, but is there any confidence that an employee of the outsourcing company will be able to promptly and, most importantly, competently advise the client on such a complex issue? Only professionals who have been working in the field of issuing visas for several years should answer here. If an outsourcing call center operator makes a mistake, the outsourcer will not lose anything, but the visa center can quickly lose its good reputation. Therefore, it’s worth thinking about opening your own call center, albeit with several operators. For small visa centers, especially those operating in not too big cities, this is not necessary.

Thus, you need a fairly large room (several hundred square meters), and the office should, if possible, be located in the central and business districts of the city. This will help attract customers, not to mention the fact that it will be more convenient for them to cooperate with a company that is not located on the outskirts of the city. The cost of renting the premises will obviously be quite high, because the office must be representative and in a good location. It is difficult to give an exact figure, because it varies greatly depending on the city.

Ready ideas for your business

Considerable funds should be allocated for equipping your premises. This includes not only office furniture and equipment, but also the organization of a call center and monitoring system, and this means the installation and adjustment of complex systems, the maintenance of which also cannot be called a cheap pleasure. Among the tips for opening a visa center you can find amounts of about 60 thousand rubles “for everything”, but for that kind of money you can hire only two people who work on computers and are in no way connected with the general system. This will essentially be a consulting bureau that will help with registration, but nothing more. If the entrepreneur is confident that this will be enough for his clients, then such a system can be used. However, the cost of opening a full-fledged visa center exceeds a million rubles, and in particularly advanced cases, tens of millions.

Of course, not every entrepreneur can find that kind of money for a business, and here you need to turn to investors (fortunately, the project is promising), banks, and business angels. It’s still not worth saving, because in this case it will not be possible to attract enough clients, and travel agencies will prefer to turn to competitors or even work independently. After all, information systems and call centers are precisely what is needed for interaction. You also need to take into account the preparation time, because not every office is designed for such power, and it will take some time to set up and configure.

Now about the most important thing in this business - attracting customers. It would seem that the services of a visa center are always of interest to potential consumers, but before the client comes for help, the entrepreneur must put a lot of effort into this. As already noted, the best option is cooperation with travel agencies. Large agencies most likely will not be interested in such cooperation, because they themselves have the opportunity to obtain visas for their consumers, and they have enough experience to do this quickly and efficiently. But start-up companies will be happy to turn to an outsourcer. True, not every novice travel agent knows that there is such an opportunity, and it may seem inconvenient to him. However, cooperation can take place in a format where the travel agent simply transfers the order to the visa center, and the client pays at the latter’s prices. Thus, the visa center makes a profit, and the travel agent gets a satisfied client. Of course, a travel agency can add its own commission to the cost of services, but usually the tour customer already receives a visa service at a reduced cost, so this may scare him away. Here you need to negotiate, achieve optimal conditions for both companies, because this can be beneficial to both, but without calculations and the right approach, such cooperation will not lead to anything good. Further, with this question everything is relatively clear.

We also need private individuals who do not apply through a travel agency. Currently, a significant portion of people who go abroad go through travel agencies; a few go to other countries to relax spontaneously, only relying on themselves. But there are some. There are even more of those who are forced to go abroad not on vacation, but on family, work or other matters. Already at this stage, the entrepreneur must clearly understand the difference between a Schengen visa and a blaue Karte, for example. Here, each client has his own approach. Including at the stage of attracting him.

Ready ideas for your business

The most desirable client is the one who travels abroad for the first time. Or at least one who has always decided everything through a travel agency (or even through another visa center), and is now faced with the need to independently understand all the intricacies. Because the trip is not a tourist one, and the visa center does not work in the required direction or is completely closed. The easiest way to attract such a client is with advertising, and all known techniques can be used. The main thing is to indicate that his issue will be resolved by professionals and with maximum support. That this will save him from many difficulties and the need to go to another city.

The information is posted on the Internet; the visa center will almost certainly be required to have its own website indicating all the necessary information. It is advisable to optimize the site so that it can be found among hundreds of other offers. Also, a good option for finding clients would be to contact companies that search for “warm” clients, that is, those who are already ready to use the service. The pleasure is expensive, but worth it. Those clients who can resolve this issue themselves can be attracted by high-quality service and the opportunity to increase their chances of obtaining a visa. However, we must not forget that the visa center cannot give any guarantee.

To work in the center it will be necessary to attract a lot of people. As already noted, the main work will be done by people who already have experience in obtaining visas. And they must be prepared to travel. Work must be organized in such a way that you can simultaneously go to another city for a large number of visas, otherwise the profitability of such a business will drop sharply. Here, in general, we need optimization of the entire process, a logistics approach (if anyone doesn’t know, logistics is not only transport and warehouse operations). You will have to work with a lot of information; when there are a lot of clients, the employee will have to be in almost two places at the same time. This cannot be done without competent modern management. If an entrepreneur is not able to optimally set up the work process, he needs to find a manager. Next, call center employees, people for administrative positions, and assistants are recruited. Depending on the volume of work, the staff may number several dozen people. All business processes that are not related to the organization’s profit making should be outsourced.

Getting into the tourism business today has become quite difficult. To operate successfully, you need a well-known brand, good service and affordable prices. But, even with all these components, no one will give you a guarantee of a quick return on your business.

However, there is a niche in the tourism sector that does not require large investments, quickly pays for itself and does not yet suffer from high competition - visa centers. Read on to find out how to open a visa center and whether you need to buy a franchise for this.

Business demand

Year to date 16.4 million Russians went abroad. The most popular countries among Russian tourists were Turkey, Egypt, Spain, Cyprus and Germany. To visit Turkey or Egypt, you just need to book a hotel and a seat on the plane, but to visit most other countries you will need to apply for a visa.

In different countries different requirements to documents for obtaining a visa and various registration procedures. If, in order to obtain a visa to Greece, it is enough to provide only an international passport, a copy of the internal passport and several photographs, then for a visa to the USA you will also have to fill out a special form in English in compliance with all transliteration rules and undergo a face-to-face interview at the embassy or consulate USA.

Of course, in both cases, obtaining a visa can become quite a troublesome task. Most people find it difficult to fill out all the necessary papers correctly, yes, then, and not everyone has the time to go to the embassy or a consulate, especially if there are none in your city.

Therefore, many today prefer to obtain visas through intermediaries. In most cases, a travel agency helps you obtain a tourist visa. But Russians are increasingly seeking to organize their trips on their own. And you don’t always need a tourist visa to travel abroad. Therefore, the popularity of such a phenomenon as visa centers is growing every year.

The first visa centers appeared in Russia at the embassies of various countries

Such intermediaries issue a visa for only one country and charge a service fee from each applicant.

Those who wish overpay a little, just to avoid having to queue at the embassy overnight, it turned out to be enough, and soon the idea of ​​​​visa centers was picked up by private business. Today, commercial visa centers can process documents for several dozen countries at once. Friendly employees of the centers tell you how to fill out the paperwork correctly, accept documents from their clients, and after a while they issue the finished document.

The work algorithm of such centers is not particularly complicated - employees only need to know how exactly to draw up documents for each specific country and submit them to the embassy. The centers cannot give guarantees that the client will definitely receive a visa, because they only intermediaries. But they take a commission from each applicant, which allows them to earn good money. Small investments and quick payback make visa centers quite an interesting and profitable business.

Visa center as a business

The visa center as a business will primarily be of interest to those who dreamed of trying myself in the field of tourism. If it is quite difficult to develop a travel agency business today - not only has demand fallen by 40-50% due to dollar and euro exchange rates, but also the number of tourists who want to organize travel on their own is increasing, and competition in the market is extremely high - then visa the center may be a much more profitable option. Although, of course, the decline in demand for tourism affects them too.

And yet, the niche of visa services is not as busy as the tourist destination as a whole, and therefore direct competition not so big here. Today there are about 60 consulates and 350 visa centers of different countries throughout Russia, and there are even fewer commercial visa centers.

It’s also worth talking about who exactly those who decide to enter this field will have to compete with. Of course, the first and main competitor is other commercial visa centers. Despite the fact that there are not many of them yet, there are already quite well-known and strong players on the market. You can defeat them due to the prices offered and the level of service. These words are confirmed by the head of the network of visa centers Denis Shipkov:

“A visa as a product is universal and does not have a large number of quality indicators, so the level of service and customer loyalty are of fundamental importance”

Official visa centers of countries can only be called competitors conditionally. Firstly, if you don’t open in a city where they exist, then you won’t have to compete with them. Secondly, commercial visa centers often work with them: prepare documents for submission, sign up their clients for interviews.

Visa centers have special relationships with travel agencies. The latter can be competitors of visa centers if they take care of processing visas for their clients or work with large tour operators. However, travel agencies themselves can be clients of visa centers. For many of them, it is much easier to outsource visa processing rather than deal with this issue themselves.

But main clients of visa centers- these are still private and legal entities. After all, we remember that visas need to be issued only for tourist trips, but also for business purposes. Although the percentage of such applications is still less than for tourist visas - out of 16.4 million Russians, only 387 thousand left for business purposes.

It is typical that the business of a visa center is very profitable. From one issued visa you can receive the same commission percentage as from one tour sold by a travel agency. According to the head of the Visa Travel network of visa centers, Denis Shipkov, the average margin on visa services is about 200 thousand rubles per month.

At the same time, opening a visa center is not as expensive as most other businesses. Head of Visa Center Network Development “Let’s go” Asya Kitaychik believes:

“In general, this business is suitable for those who do not have large savings - the initial investment is minimal.”

To open a visa center, you just need to rent office space, furnish it with office equipment and hire employees. Investments in such a business range from 200 to 500 thousand rubles.

High margins and relatively small investments ensure a fairly quick return on investment for visa centers. The average period to expect is from 6 to 9 months. However, a business can pay off much faster.

One of important conditions, affecting competition, customer flow and business profitability is the city in which the visa center is opened. On the one hand, the more population there is in a city, the more potential clients the visa center has, and therefore more income. On the other hand, in most millionaires the competition is higher.

The most attractive for a visa center as a business may be medium-sized and small cities where the demand for tourism services is high and there are few direct competitors. Although not all industry representatives agree that the city where the visa center is located is of great importance. Director "Visaturservice" in Novosibirsk Maria Strashnova shares his experience:

“Little depends on the size of the city, for example, we have offices in the small cities of Prokopyevsk and Tver. Naturally, there are differences in the way we work with clients. But it’s also interesting to work in big cities.”

To more accurately understand whether a visa center will work in your city, you need to analyze the market: how high is the demand and for which areas, are there too many competitors around, will there be room for the business to grow. Of course, it will be difficult for a novice businessman to carry out such an analysis. Therefore, it makes sense to buy a visa center franchise.

Visa center franchise

Visa centers selling a franchise, before discussing its terms with a potential franchisee, first of all find out where the opening is planned. Often, if your city already has a branch of a network of visa centers, you will not be able to open there as a franchise. Director of the Vizaturservice company in Novosibirsk, Maria Strashnova, explains: “Our agreement provides for the exclusive right to open a visa center within one city. Naturally, in some large cities there may be several offices. All this is calculated individually by our specialists.”

In especially large cities, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, they see the point of opening several branches and other networks, for example, "International Visa Center". The competition here is, of course, high, but there are also a sufficient number of potential clients who do not want to travel from one area of ​​the city to another to apply for a visa.

The visa center-franchisor not only assesses how suitable a particular city is for the franchisee’s business, it also transfers business processes that a newcomer often does not have time to set up. Head of the network Visa Travel Denis Shipkov explains:

“Every day we have to deal with new changes in terms of legislation, procedures and nuances of processing visa documents. Sometimes there is simply no time left to rethink business processes.”

For example, from September 1, 2015 The rules for obtaining Schengen visas have changed for Russians. Now, in order to obtain permission to enter the Schengen zone, you must submit fingerprints, which no longer automatically allows you to obtain a visa without a personal visit to the consulate and the visa center attached to it. A commercial visa center will not be able to accept fingerprinting; it will only be able to sign up the client for this procedure.

Head of a travel agency "Global Voyage" and a potential franchisee from Kazan Ekaterina Khramkova believes that this practice will have a very negative impact on the work of commercial visa centers: “Private centers do not have the right to do fingerprinting. Therefore, in any case, a person will have to go to the official visa center at the consulate, and there he will encounter the same polite treatment and willingness to help. Plus, he will see that the service fee is lower. Next time, to apply for a visa, he will prefer to contact the center at the consulate directly.” According to Ekaterina, it is possible to compete in such conditions only by providing some new services that are in demand on the market.

We also note that Schengen visas are the most popular in Russia. In 2014, Russians received 5.76 million such visas. Therefore, refusal to issue Schengen visas through commercial visa centers can greatly impact their revenue.

Those who are not afraid of difficulties should know that

Business processes and components of the franchise package - what you need to pay attention to first when purchasing a visa center franchise

You can handle most of these tasks yourself. The most valuable acquisitions that you receive with a franchise are a special CRM system that will allow you to track work with each client, partnerships with travel agencies and a guaranteed flow of clients in the first month of operation.

In addition, working under a franchise provides such an advantage as the opportunity to organize the provision of expensive additional services.

Additional services

In addition to the fact that the markup on each issued visa can be up to 40%, visa centers also make money on additional services.

Some of the services overlap with what travel agencies offer. The visa centers realized in time that even those who decided to go abroad on their own still need to fly to the place, get from the airport to the hotel and check in. Therefore, visa centers offer the client to book plane tickets, a hotel room, order a transfer, rent a car abroad and take out insurance. All these services help you earn additional income and do not require special competencies.