Corporate mobility planners have been warned to fast-track February travel to Italy after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced a week-long shutdown of its global e-visa platform, Portale Visti. An advisory circulated by the Italian Embassy in Dhaka on 26 January states that no visa applications of any category will be accepted worldwide from 11 to 18 February while engineers migrate the 15-year-old system to a new cloud architecture compatible with the forthcoming EU Entry/Exit System. (tbsnews.net)
During the outage, consulates and outsourcing partners VFS Global and TLScontact will be unable to issue appointments, print visa stickers or retrieve pending files. Only additional documents explicitly requested for already-lodged cases can be submitted in person. Applicants needing to travel between 11 and 18 February are urged to file well before 1 February because approvals can take up to 10 days once processing resumes.
For companies scrambling to rearrange itineraries or secure alternative Schengen access, specialised visa concierge services like VisaHQ can shoulder the paperwork. Their Italy desk (https://www.visahq.com/italy/) monitors consular alerts in real time, finds earlier appointments in neighbouring jurisdictions, and pre-screens documentation to cut repeat submissions—saving mobility teams valuable days during disruptions such as the Portale Visti migration.
![Italian Visa Centres Worldwide to Halt All Applications 11-18 February for System Migration]()
The shutdown comes at the start of Italy’s spring trade-fair season, when thousands of buyers head to Milan Fashion Week and the VicenzaOro jewellery show. Multinational companies should audit all planned staff movements, prioritise urgent Schengen C-visas, and consider routing non-EU executives through other Schengen states if Italian entry is time-critical. Holders of multi-entry Schengen visas are unaffected.
Consular sources say the migration will allow real-time data sharing with EU border-management platforms and eventually enable self-service tracking for applicants. The foreign ministry has pledged that processing speeds will improve by at least 20 percent once the portal relaunches on 19 February.
While scheduled outside peak summer months, the outage is a reminder of the fragility of legacy consular IT in many EU states. HR and global-mobility teams should build contingency lead-times into Italian assignment planning through the first half of 2026, when further upgrades are expected ahead of EES go-live.
During the outage, consulates and outsourcing partners VFS Global and TLScontact will be unable to issue appointments, print visa stickers or retrieve pending files. Only additional documents explicitly requested for already-lodged cases can be submitted in person. Applicants needing to travel between 11 and 18 February are urged to file well before 1 February because approvals can take up to 10 days once processing resumes.
For companies scrambling to rearrange itineraries or secure alternative Schengen access, specialised visa concierge services like VisaHQ can shoulder the paperwork. Their Italy desk (https://www.visahq.com/italy/) monitors consular alerts in real time, finds earlier appointments in neighbouring jurisdictions, and pre-screens documentation to cut repeat submissions—saving mobility teams valuable days during disruptions such as the Portale Visti migration.
The shutdown comes at the start of Italy’s spring trade-fair season, when thousands of buyers head to Milan Fashion Week and the VicenzaOro jewellery show. Multinational companies should audit all planned staff movements, prioritise urgent Schengen C-visas, and consider routing non-EU executives through other Schengen states if Italian entry is time-critical. Holders of multi-entry Schengen visas are unaffected.
Consular sources say the migration will allow real-time data sharing with EU border-management platforms and eventually enable self-service tracking for applicants. The foreign ministry has pledged that processing speeds will improve by at least 20 percent once the portal relaunches on 19 February.
While scheduled outside peak summer months, the outage is a reminder of the fragility of legacy consular IT in many EU states. HR and global-mobility teams should build contingency lead-times into Italian assignment planning through the first half of 2026, when further upgrades are expected ahead of EES go-live.
