Tony Y. Says:
My wife and I would like to travel Europe for more than the 90 days allowed as a standard visa. Can you please advise us on a simple way to extend our visa? Six months would be nice.
IL Executive Editor Jennifer Stevens Says:
Hi Tony,
Lots of Europhiles dream of taking six months or a year to explore Europe… traveling from country to country… staying put for a while (maybe even renting an apartment or villa for a month or two) and getting to know a region… then moving on to the next enticing destination…
To do it, you’ll need to understand Europe’s Schengen Zone.
Most of mainland Europe—26 countries, at present—belongs to this Zone. These countries have a uniform visa policy and no passport controls between them.
Your passport will be checked—possibly quite carefully—when you first enter the Zone via a member country. But once you enter the Schengen Zone, your passport normally won’t be checked again until you leave the Zone. So, for most practical purposes, you can treat the Zone like a single country.
You can stay in the Schengen Zone for 90 days out of every 180-day period—the “standard visa” you mentioned.
Then, you can simply stay in a country outside the Zone for the remaining 90 days of the 180-day period. You can then return to a Schengen-Zone country for a further 90 days. This is what’s known as the “Schengen Hop.”
There are several nearby countries to choose from that are outside the Schengen Zone. In these countries, you can pleasantly wait out the rest of your 180-day period. First are four EU countries: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Ireland and Romania. (Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Romania will soon join the Zone.) There is also Albania, which is not yet a member of the EU.
This is a great way to extend your time in Europe—spend 90 days in Zone countries like France and Italy, then hop over to Ireland or Cyprus for 90 days, then back to the mainland.
There are two things to keep in mind when using this trick to extend your time in Europe:
- Remember that 90 days is not the same as three months. It is possible to get caught out this way and accidentally overstay your visa.
- Make sure that passport control stamps your passport every time you enter or leave the Zone. If it doesn’t, you have no way to prove how many days you’ve stayed.
Keep all this in mind, and you should be free to explore Europe for six months or longer.
Bon voyage!
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