I used a company called CIBT for my visa – I’ve dealt with them before and they are pretty helpful. The China visa application form itself didn’t seem too complicated but since I need a double entry visa, they seemed to want a large amount of information on flight and hotel bookings.

Since I am going on a gadventures tour and I booked all my flights through flight centre, I was entitled to a discount on their visa fee.

I paid an extra £46 on top of the £111 embassy fee for my visa but considering they do all the checking of documents and I was not going to risk being rejected, I figured it was a good investment. Especially as I had a number of different hotel bookings – including the fake ones required because I want to go into Tibet. God forbid you mention that on your visa. I was told it’s almost a guaranteed rejection. It would be like the UK Government saying to tourists, yes you can come to our country but you must not go to Wales. Weird.

Flight centre are an absolute dream to book with. I recently went to Bali on a family holiday and we booked our flights with a lady called Megan in the St Albans office. She then moved up to Manchester but took our booking with her and kept us updated on flight changes and the like.

As a result of how wonderful she was, I asked if she would help me in booking my flights on this trip. I sent her my handy trip spreadsheet – see, an auditor at heart, and she came back with various options for flights – especially for the second half of my trip which is still all up in the air but at least we were able to get the Asia part sorted!

Booking with flight centre also gives you a discount on the gadventures tours and the flight centre people get paid by some form of commission so anyone looking to book through flight centre, I would highly recommend it! Not sure I could have done it without them to be honest.