Try to book a Poland appointment in Mumbai and the calendar shows exactly one day: the last working day of the month, opened for booking two months ahead. Delhi does better, but not by much — the Embassy holds Schengen interviews once a week, every Wednesday at 11:00, and at no other time.
Poland issues the same uniform Schengen short-stay visa as its neighbours, decided by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in New Delhi or its Consulate General in Mumbai depending on where you live, and lodged through Visa Application Centres rather than at either post in person. Read the checklist those offices publish and one line stands out: next to the flight document, in brackets, it says the reservation is enough on its own.
Your home state decides which office reads your file
The Embassy in New Delhi is the consular authority for applicants living in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Delhi NCR, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tripura, Uttaranchal, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, along with Ladakh — and it is also the post of record for Afghanistan and Bhutan. The Consulate General in Mumbai takes everyone else: Andhra Pradesh, Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Goa, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Two separate systems run in parallel here, and it is easy to open the wrong one. e-Konsulat is where Poland’s own long-stay national visas — work, study — are registered. The tourist and business Schengen visa this page is about goes through VFS Global’s own booking page instead, on the schedule the next section describes.
Wednesday in Delhi, once a month in Mumbai
Slots are not released on demand. Gov.pl’s own notice puts it plainly: the Embassy in New Delhi holds Schengen appointments once a week, every Wednesday at 11:00. The Consulate General in Mumbai holds them once a month, on the last working day, opened for booking two months in advance.
- One appointment slot, every Wednesday, 11:00
- One appointment day a month — the last working day — booked two months ahead
Miss the window and the next one is not next week. For a Mumbai applicant it is next month, on a date fixed before you have even shortlisted hotels. That scarcity is the argument for having every other document ready before you book, not after: a flight reservation, an accommodation booking and an insurance certificate that all agree with each other, so the one appointment you can get is not spent on a gap that should have been closed earlier.
The flight document is marked “reservation only”
Item 6 on the VFS checklist for a Polish tourist visa reads: FLIGHT ITINERARY (RESERVATION ONLY). Poland is one of the few Schengen posts in India that puts that instruction in capitals on the form itself, rather than leaving it to be inferred from the word “reservation” elsewhere. Where the trip covers more than one Schengen state, the same item also asks for the connecting leg — an intra-Schengen flight reservation, a train itinerary or a car rental.
There is also a genuine nonstop option into Warsaw. LOT Polish Airlines has run the only direct service between Delhi and Warsaw since September 2019, on Boeing 787 Dreamliners — a single-carrier reservation that never touches a third country’s immigration desk. Schedules and availability move, and routing through a Gulf or European hub remains an entirely ordinary way to reach Warsaw or Kraków; either way, what the checklist wants is a held reservation covering the whole route, not a purchased fare.
Accommodation, and the €30,000 that has to survive the whole trip
The checklist’s accommodation item asks for an original document confirming the availability, in Poland or in each Schengen state visited, of appropriate accommodation for the intended stay — a hotel reservation, the rental of a holiday home, or, where you are staying with someone, proof of that sponsorship from the host.
Insurance is more specific than the amount most applicants remember. The Travel Medical Insurance certificate has to come from a company on the Schengen consular posts’ own approved list, the insured’s name has to be written in the Latin alphabet, and cover of at least €30,000 has to run for the entire stay, including emergency medical treatment, hospitalisation and repatriation, in case of death included. A handwritten certificate is refused outright, the checklist says, whichever insurer issued it.
The passport stamp is gone; the checklist is not
Poland’s own visa notes make a point most applicants never read: now that the Visa Information System has reached full operational efficiency, a Schengen applicant’s passport is no longer stamped with the admissibility mark that used to confirm a file had been accepted for examination, under Article 20 of the EU’s Visa Code. It is a change to the border record, not to the documents — the flight reservation, the accommodation proof and the insurance certificate above do exactly the job they did before VIS, and nothing on the checklist got shorter because of it.
Fourteen days to appeal, and a fee either way
A refusal comes with fourteen days on the clock, counted from the day you collect your passport. Appealing means resubmitting the passport, a written appeal letter, and a fresh visa fee — the consulate’s own fee schedule, effective 01-01-2026, prices reconsideration of a Schengen visa decision at ₹9,504, separately from the ₹21,120 charged to reconsider a national visa. Where a Schengen visa is revoked or annulled rather than refused, the same fourteen-day window applies for reconsideration, and no fresh fee is charged that time.
Three of the documents on that checklist are ours to prepare: the flight reservation, sitting in the carrier’s system rather than paid for outright; the accommodation booking, covering every night the itinerary states; and the €30,000 travel insurance, from an insurer on the approved list, with the name spelt in the Latin alphabet the certificate requires. None of it buys the appointment slot, and none of it decides what the Embassy or the Consulate General does with the file. What it does is make sure the one Wednesday a Delhi applicant gets, or the one day a month a Mumbai applicant gets, is not spent explaining a gap that should have been closed before the booking was made.