Whether you’re a hippy, a business traveller or an international playboy, there is one irritating thing that unites all these people; filling out a visa application form.

Now, thank God, there’s a (free) app for that. VisaVisum is an Android app that lets international travellers fill in visa application forms straight from their mobile. It was developed by a team of IT experts and tourism professionals based in the Sussex Innovation Centre at the University of Sussex, near Brighton.

More than 500,000 international students attend UK universities and require visas to visit mainland Europe, and there is an increasing demand for an easier and more convenient way of filling out application forms for visas.

VisaVisum has launched with a limited beta site (https://visavisum.com/), and covers visas to countries that are part of the Schengen Agreement, including Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Slovenia, Portugal, Netherlands, Malta, Latvia, Italy, Iceland, Hungary, Greece, Germany, France, Finland, Denmark, Czech Republic, Belgium and Austria.

“Getting the Visa application papers to travel is a real ordeal, writing out details over and over again in whatever format was required by the various embassies and consulates. Now that the technology exists to collate all that data more efficiently,” said Yehuda Hecht, Founder of VisaVisum.

This is a simple idea that will appeal, especially to regular business travellers. Now if this app can sort out more ‘difficult’ visas such as those for Russia and Nigeria, there is certainly a market for this to be a paid-for app. I’d pay anything never to see the inside of a visa office ever again.