Your passport, hand-delivered to the Chinese consulate.

Passagely is a passport courier for Chinese visa applicants. After you submit your COVA (China's online visa application), your passport still has to be physically dropped off and picked up at your assigned consulate. We handle both trips: you ship us your passport using the prepaid label we email you, and a Passagely courier submits it at the correct consulate, retrieves it when your visa is issued, and mails it back to your door.

Your passport ships with $500 of document coverage, tracking in both directions, and signature-required delivery at every handoff. At the consulate, it's carried by a background-checked Passagely employee — never a third-party or gig courier.

China assigns each U.S. state to one of five consular districts: the Embassy in Washington, D.C. or the Consulates General in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Submitting to the wrong one gets your application rejected. Enter your ZIP code at checkout and we route your passport to the right window automatically.

Not yet — today we're purely the courier layer. You complete the COVA yourself at consular.mfa.gov.cn/VISA, and checkout walks you through confirming each application shows “Passport to be submitted” before you ship, so nothing bounces at the consulate. Guided COVA support is on our roadmap.

Standard — 2–3 day shipping each way with the consulate's regular 4-business-day processing — typically runs 10–14 days door to door. Express pairs overnight shipping both ways with the consulate's 3-business-day express window, and typically runs 5–8 days.

It happens more often than you'd think — and a returned application is not a rejection. Consulates send applications back every day for small fixes or missing documents. We tell you the same day, directly from the window, and when the fix is something our courier can handle on the spot, we do. Otherwise you send us the corrected or missing documents and we resubmit for a $20 re-submission fee. Most applications only ever need one submission.

True rejections are rare, and they're different from a returned application. If the consulate denies your visa, we refund the visa application fee in full — the consulate doesn't collect it on denials. The Passagely service fee isn't refundable, since the shipping and consulate trips have already been performed. If you're issued a visa with shorter validity or fewer entries than you requested, we refund the difference in the visa fee. Either way, your passport ships back to you on the return leg you already paid for.

Please don't — the consulate can't accept a passport whose application hasn't reached “Passport to be submitted,” and premature packages are the most common cause of delays. If your passport arrives early, we hold it securely until your COVA status clears, and a $100 holding-and-handling fee per passport applies before it can be submitted. The confirmation step at checkout exists to save you from exactly this.

China only, for now — going deep on one consulate system is how we keep the service fast and reliable. More destinations are coming; joining the waitlist from any page gets you early access as they launch.