Belgium’s tourism checklist opens with a warning rather than an instruction: if Belgium is not your main destination, the application can be refused. Most of the work in a Belgium file goes into proving that Belgium is where the trip actually happens.
The Benelux itinerary is what makes that hard. You fly into Amsterdam because that is where the fare was, take the train down for two nights in Bruges and three in Brussels, then leave from Paris. Three countries, eight days, and no obvious answer to the first question a consulate asks: whose application is this?
The European Commission’s visa handbook settles it with an example that happens to be about Belgium. Six days in Belgium on business, six days with relatives in France, arriving and departing through Amsterdam: because the stays are equal, either the Belgian or the French consulate may take it — each counts as a main destination — and the Netherlands does not become responsible merely because the plane landed there. First entry is the tiebreak of last resort.
Delhi or Mumbai — and the form you fill before either
VFS Global is the service delivery provider for the Embassy of Belgium in New Delhi, and the consular districts split the country in half: New Delhi takes north and east India, the Consulate General in Mumbai takes west and south. Each post keeps its own visa mailbox — newdelhi.visa@diplobel.fed.be, mumbai.visa@diplobel.fed.be.
Before any of that comes the form, and Belgium does not hand you a PDF. Applications are created on VisaOnWeb, the Foreign Affairs portal, then printed, signed and carried to the application centre. The embassy adds a detail that quietly ruins schedules: the form you create there is valid for 30 days. The VFS India one-pager says new slots for the north and east zone are released on the first Monday of each month, for the month ahead. Fill the form the evening you decide to travel and it can lapse before a slot opens.
Fees, as the centre quotes them: €90 for an adult, shown as ₹9,720; €45 for a child aged 6 to 12; free under six. The centre also states a decision inside 15 working days as a general rule, extendable to 30 calendar days and exceptionally 60.
Item 7 and item 8, in Belgium’s own words
Belgium’s India post publishes no tourism PDF of its own; it points applicants at the embassy site for the list by category. The tourism checklist Belgium’s posts do publish — current version from its Consulate General in Montreal, revised 2025 — runs to thirteen numbered items. Two of them decide your travel documents.
Item 7, travel arrangements. “Flight reservation (return) or other evidence of planned travel. Include your full itinerary if you intend to travel to more than one Member State of the Schengen area (in this case also indicate the means of transport used to travel between each country).”
Read the bracket closely, because Benelux files lose marks there. The requirement is transport between countries, not between cities: Brussels–Bruges and Brussels–Ghent sit inside Belgium and nobody asks you to evidence them. The Amsterdam–Brussels and Brussels–Paris legs cross between Member States, and each wants naming with its mode of travel.
Item 8, confirmed accommodation. Proof of confirmed accommodation in Belgium — and in the other Schengen countries you are visiting — “mentioning the name, address, telephone number of the hotel, as well as the confirmation number of the reservation.” That confirmation number is not decoration. It is the field that turns paper into something a person at a desk can test.
Hold the reservation now, buy the ticket afterwards
So the order Belgium expects is the order that protects you: the held reservation goes into the file, and the ticket gets bought once the visa is in the passport.
That held reservation is the document we issue, built to the airport your plan actually uses — Brussels Airport (BRU) on most Belgian files, occasionally Charleroi (CRL) or Antwerp (ANR).
One caution most pages selling this document leave out. The same handbook warns consulates that “a hotel reservation is a weak means of proving purpose of travel considering the ease with which such reservations may be cancelled free of charge.” Your accommodation proof clears item 8; it does not explain why you are going. That work belongs to the itinerary, the leave letter and whatever pulls you home.
€95 a day, and where the number comes from
Belgium publishes a figure rather than leaving funds to instinct. The Commission’s Annex 25 collects the reference amounts each Member State has fixed for crossing its external border, and the Belgian entry gives two. A traveller staying at a hotel who cannot demonstrate other credit must have access to approximately €95 for each day of the planned stay; staying with a private individual, approximately €45. Seven nights in a Brussels hotel therefore has your file asserting something near €665 before flights, and the checklist asks for three months of bank statements plus three salary slips to see it.
Four things the insurance certificate has to say
Belgium does not want a policy number. Its checklist wants one clear certificate stating the traveller’s name, the period of coverage, the geographical area and the amounts covered — minimum €30,000 — with hospital care, emergency treatment and repatriation including in the event of death. The embassy’s India page repeats the same €30,000 floor.
Two handbook points change how you buy it. Cover must run for the entire period of the intended stay, not the visa’s validity. And the policy “should be taken out with a company based in the applicant’s country of residence or in a Member State”, so an IRDAI-licensed Indian insurer is the natural choice here. There is no EU-wide register of approved insurers; consulates share that information locally, so follow any list your post publishes.
Since 10-04-2026, nobody stamps your passport
The EU’s Entry/Exit System began operating in stages on 12-10-2025 and, per the Commission, became fully operational on 10-04-2026. It registers your name, travel-document data, fingerprints, facial image and the date and place of every entry and exit. The ink stamp is gone.
For a Belgium trip that creates a wrinkle. Your entry record is made wherever you first cross the Schengen external border: connect through Frankfurt or Paris and it names Germany or France, because the hop to Brussels is an internal flight with no border check; come in over Doha, Dubai or Istanbul and Brussels is your first entry. The Commission is ahead of this — its handbook cautions consulates that the state shown by entry and exit records “is not reliable evidence for the Member State of the main destination, especially if the applicant has travelled by air.” Nothing in the border record proves where your nights were. Your file does that.
Where Belgium files come apart
- Nights that do not add up. The hotel checks in the day after the flight lands, or the two nights before the return leg have nothing attached. Item 8 asks for the stay, not most of it.
- A misrepresentation finding outlasts any refusal.
- Insurance that reads “Europe”. The certificate has to name an area and an amount an officer can match to €30,000, and it has to still be running on your last night — not on the return date you first sketched.
- A VisaOnWeb form created too early. Thirty days is thirty days, and the north and east zone releases slots monthly. Sequence the two.
- A Belgian application for a Dutch trip. If the nights are mostly in the Netherlands, that is a jurisdiction problem no paperwork repairs.
Three items on that list are ones we can build: the return reservation item 7 asks for, a hotel booking carrying the confirmation number item 8 names, and an IRDAI-licensed policy printing the four elements Belgium wants to read. The rest of the file is yours — and so is the outcome, which belongs to the consulate.