A quick trip to France whilst on holiday in the UK

I am a UK citizen married to a Thai National. We're going to the UK in July for a 2 month holiday and we'd like to pop over to France via the Plymouth-Roscoff ferry to spend 5 days at my brothers holiday home in Brittany. My brother would be driving us there and back. Do we really have to go through the whole schengen palaver here in Thailand or is there an alternative for such a short trip? My wife has a tourist visa for the UK all sorted. She also has good travel insurance for the trip.

Best Answer

Your wife will need some document to show at the border crossing. Being the family member of an EU citizen will make getting the document much easier, especially if she plans to cross the border with you, but a document is still required. A normal UK tourist visa does not allow visits to the Schengen area, or vice versa. You can't expect the border guards to sort out marriage certificates, that's what visa officials are trained to do.

You might try to apply from the UK, arguing that the trip is spontaneous and that an application from Thailand would be undue hardship. That brings the risk of being rejected because you really should have applied from Thailand.
If you look at the Schengen visa application form, you will see that the family members of an EU citizen don't have to fill the most bothersome parts of the form. The fields 34 and 35 replace those fields marked by an asterisk.