Do not use this company. My experience with them has been negative from first to last.
1) When I first enquired about using the company’s services, I was advised that I should choose their express service because it would be less likely that I would have to come to Manchester to have my fingerprints taken than if I were to choose the standard service. This seems dubious to me – if I had been required to give fingerprints then I don’t see why choosing the express service would have bypassed this requirement. I can only assume that they were trying to take advantage of my naiveté to extract more money from me.
2) After I had sent the necessary documents to the company, I was told there was another document that I needed to send. I made absolutely sure that this was not the case, told them so, and was promptly told that there was no need for the supposedly vital document after all.
3) Despite my having chosen the express service, my visa was a week late, taking significantly longer than even the standard service should have taken. I am convinced that the only reason my visa wasn’t even later was that I called them after the third missed arrival date and refused to accept being fobbed off with their usual excuses. When it finally arrived, it came without the receipt I had specifically requested and been promised.
4) I was constantly misled about when my visa would arrive. I was first told it would arrive on a particular Thursday, then the following Tuesday, then Wednesday, then Thursday. Whether the constant delays were due to their incompetence or not I can’t say (though I could guess), but in either case, I was not kept informed – my visa would simply fail to arrive on the specified day without a word from them. I was never offered any kind of apology for any of this.
5) My attempts to get information about what was happening were not answered satisfactorily. I called their office several times to be told that the person I needed to speak to wasn’t there but that he would call me when he got in – this didn’t happen. Replies to my emails were unprofessionally presented (poor spelling/grammar) and vague – not reassuring given that they had £317 of my money as well as my passport.
My overall impression of this company is that they are not fit to run a bath, let alone a visa service. I spent a lot of the time in which I was dealing with them genuinely concerned that they might have been con artists who were just planning to abscond with my money and passport. Please avoid using them if you value your time and sanity.