What was the experience and timeline for getting a DTV Workcation visa approved in Vientiane after a rejection in HCMC?

DTV Workcation APPROVED at Vientiane — after a prior rejection at HCMC (+ research PDF in the comments)

My DTV Workcation got approved at Vientiane on Friday 26 June — after a previous rejection at HCMC in May. Posting the full timeline + what the consul said about why the first application was rejected, in case it helps others in the same situation 🙏

Huge shoutout to IssaCompass as well! I used an agency after my initial self-submitted application got rejected and I wanted to get it right this time 😅 They were very helpful and steered me in the right direction, highly recommended!

# Profile (in general terms)

* EU citizen

* Owner-director of a private limited company in a different EU jurisdiction (no salary draw — the jurisdiction taxes only distributed profits, not retained earnings)

* Software professional, international clients across Europe + US (no Thai clients, no Thai-source income)

* Company has a steady cashflow with yearly revenue over 6 figures USD.

* Submitted Personal savings account at the time of the Vientiane interview: Wise savings jar with 27,000 USD. When I applied in HCMC it had 57,000 USD but then I moved ~30,000 USD to physical bank in case my Vientiane application would be rejected due to Wise, but luckily it wasn't

* Prior tax residency in an Asian country through late 2025 (didn't have documents when applied in HCMC)

Previously rejected for DTV Workcation at HCMC in May 2026, no reason given

#

Timeline

* Tue 5 May 2026 — applied at HCMC

* Tue 12 May — additional-documents request from HCMC, resubmitted

* Mon 18 May — rejection email from HCMC, no reason

* ----

* late May – early June — prepared a refreshed package and engaged ISSA Compass for the Vientiane attempt

* Sun 14 June — flew to Vientiane

* Mon 15 June — application submitted by ISSA at the Royal Thai Embassy Vientiane

* Tue 16 June — fee paid (10,000 THB cash at the embassy, before noon — afternoon payments are not accepted)

* Wed 17 June — embassy requested two additional items: (1) screenshot of mobile banking app open with the funded account visible, (2) photo of physical debit card next to phone showing the same app

* Thu 18 June — additional photos submitted

* Sat 20 June — interview scheduled for Fri 26 June, 10:30–11:00

* Fri 26 June, 10:30 — interview held

* Fri 26 June, ~16:00 — approval by email

Total Vientiane elapsed time: 11 days from application to approval.

# Submitted documents

1. A consolidated work pack (~50 pages) — motivation letter, business-register extract, company profile, director letter, the most recently filed annual report, 12-month invoice summary, portfolio examples, LinkedIn profile

2. 6 months of personal bank statements (Dec 2025 – May 2026) showing the maintained balance in the funded savings account

3. The Vientiane hotel booking covering the in-Laos stay

4. Passport biodata + relevant visa pages

5. DTV application form

6. 10,000 THB embassy fee payment confirmation

7. Later (Wed 17 June, after the embassy additional-docs request): live banking-app screenshot + physical debit-card photo

Two items that were NEW in the Vientiane application compared to the earlier HCMC one:

* A fresh business-register extract dated days before submission — at the time of the HCMC application the most-recently-ended fiscal year's annual report had not yet been filed (statutory filing deadline was at the end of June), so HCMC could only see the prior year. By Vientiane it was available.

* A self-issued remote-work consent letter on company letterhead with the verbatim wording previously requested by Vientiane in another applicant's additional-docs notice (no employment with Thai clients, no income-generating work in Thailand, etc.) — included up front to pre-empt the same additional-docs round.

Documents I also brought to the interview in my bag (not part of the submission), in case they came up:

* A signed director's service agreement formalising the engagement

* The most recent annual report (filed just before the application),

* An invoice-to-bank-deposit reconciliation table with the matching deposits highlighted on the bank statements

* The prior Asian-jurisdiction tax-residency documentation. I only produced an item when a specific question opened the door for it.

# The interview

One interviewer. Polite, professional. Approximately 15 minutes. She physically went through many of the printed documents I brought — flipping pages, asking about specific entries, comparing figures across sheets. The paper preparation mattered.

She also asked to look at my live banking app on the phone. While scrolling through the account history she noticed a recent client deposit that had landed AFTER the application was submitted (i.e. mid-process, in the days between submission and the interview). She remarked on it positively — the file said "this is a working business with recurring foreign-client revenue", and she could see a fresh data point confirming that in real time. Worth knowing if your business is active: the live app demo can corroborate the income story, not just the balance.

Questions asked (paraphrased — only the ones I think are useful to share):

1. How will you support yourself in Thailand?

2. Can you show your employment contract? (When I explained that I own the company and am its sole employee/director, she shifted to looking at the company-side documents.)

3. Have you applied for a DTV before?

4. Why do you think you were rejected at the first embassy?

5. What taxes does your company pay? (Where my company's jurisdiction taxes only distributed profits required a verbal explanation — €0 corporate income tax on retained earnings is correct but not the answer most applicants give.)

6. Where did you pay personal tax previously? (This is where the prior-Asian-tax-residency documentation came out of the bag.)

Then: thank you, no further questions, decision will arrive by email. About five hours later the approval email landed.

# Documentation that the consul spent time on during the page review

* The work pack ISSA submitted (especially the invoice summary and the director letter)

* The 6 months of bank statements

* The director's service agreement (once produced)

* The most recent annual report (once produced)

* The remote-work consent letter — the verbatim wording was noticed and acknowledged

* The prior Asian-jurisdiction tax-residency documentation, once produced from the bag

# What the consul said about the HCMC rejection

I asked at interview in Vientiane. The consul told me HCMC flagged the file on two axes:

1. "Financial state not in good state" — even though I had a substantial personal savings balance maintained for 6+ months at the time of application. The consul indicated the issue was the *shape* of the financial story, not the balance itself: there was no monthly inflow that read as personal income, no salary line, no payslip.

2. Work-and-income concerns — even though the company had been generating consistent monthly foreign-client revenue. The likely contributing factors: I did not draw a personal salary (the company's jurisdiction taxes only distributed profits, so retained earnings are tax-free until paid out as dividend — no payroll exists), and I did not include personal tax-residency documentation in the first submission.

Sharing this because rejection reasons in this group are nearly always "no reason given." This is a rare direct read-out from a consul who had reviewed the file.

# On ISSA Compass

The main benefit was that they recommended the right embassy for my situation. After the HCMC rejection I wasn't sure where to go next, and their recommendation of Vientiane turned out to be the right call given my profile.

* They answered my concerned regarding Wise, after I panicked and already transfered ~30,000 USD to another physical bank account to start season it. They said that it should be fine in Laos, which it was!

* They thoroughly reviewed all my documents and noticed I submitted 6 months bank statements as 1 statement (🤦‍♂️). They asked me to submit month by month statements

* It ended up cheaper than I expected — my pre-paid agency fee included the visa fee, but when I had to pay the 10,000 THB cash at the embassy in person, ISSA refunded that amount back to me. Net cost was the agency fee minus the visa fee. Definitely worth more than what they are charging in my opinion.

* Fast communication is on WhatsApp. Embassy scheduled interview on a Saturday and they let me know couple hours later. When my visa got approved they sent me my Visa in a matter of minutes

# Companion documents in the ATTACHMENT

📎 Companion research document — first comment below 👇

I pulled together a ~9-page PDF synthesis of approval and rejection stories shared in this group between Jan 2025 and June 2026 (~25 posts directly cited with links so you can read the original threads). Covers embassy-by-embassy patterns, Workcation vs Soft Power, and what the corpus suggests about hard gates and rejection reasons.

It's in the first comment because I couldn't attach files directly to the post — hopefully that's ok with the mods 🙏

Quick caveats up front: this is anecdotal group-knowledge synthesis, not legal or visa advice. The sample was assembled via group keyword searches ("workcation", "Vientiane", "rejected", "approved", "interview", etc.), so it's not a complete read of every post — anything that didn't surface for those terms isn't represented. Embassy processes change. Country jurisdictions for consular services change. Do your own reading on top of this before committing to a specific embassy.