Last updated: August 2026. This policy applies to all digital products sold by Europa, including The Complete Europe Visa Guide.
The short version. Our guide is a digital file. To get instant access you must tick a box at checkout confirming you want the download immediately and that you accept you are giving up your 14-day cancellation right. Once the file has been downloaded, the sale is final and no refund is available. If you have paid but not yet downloaded, you can still cancel within 14 days for a full refund.
You are buying digital content supplied electronically — a PDF and accompanying template files. Nothing physical is shipped. Because a digital file cannot be “returned” once it has been received, refund rules for digital content differ from those for physical goods, and the law recognises this.
If you are a consumer in the European Union or the United Kingdom, you normally have 14 days from the moment your order is confirmed to withdraw from a distance contract without giving any reason. This right comes from the EU Consumer Rights Directive (2011/83/EU) and, in the UK, the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013.
There is a specific and important exception for downloadable digital content, explained next.
Under Article 16(m) of the Consumer Rights Directive — and regulation 37 of the UK Regulations — the right to cancel is lost for digital content that is not supplied on a physical medium, provided all three of the following are true:
At checkout you are asked to tick a required box giving exactly that consent and acknowledgement. Your tick is timestamped and stored against your order, and it is repeated back to you in your order confirmation email. That email is your durable-medium confirmation.
After the guide has been downloaded, we do not offer refunds. The consent described in section 3 is given before access is granted, so by the time the file reaches you the cancellation right has already been validly waived. This applies regardless of whether you have read the guide, and regardless of the outcome of any visa application.
This is standard practice for digital publications and it protects against the obvious problem: a file, once downloaded, cannot be given back.
If you have paid but have not accessed or downloaded any file, and you are within 14 days of purchase, email us and we will cancel the order and refund you in full. We can verify from our systems whether a download has taken place.
Nothing in this policy removes your statutory rights. If the file is corrupted, will not open, is materially incomplete, or is significantly different from how it is described on this website, you are entitled to a remedy under the EU Digital Content Directive (2019/770) and, in the UK, the Consumer Rights Act 2015.
In those cases we will first attempt to repair or replace the file. If we cannot supply a working, correctly described product within a reasonable time, you are entitled to a refund. Contact us and describe the problem — we will not make this difficult.
Embassy fees, VFS charges, travel costs and any other third-party expenses are never refundable by us — we never receive that money.
If you were charged twice for the same order, or a payment was made from your card without your authorisation, contact us immediately. Duplicate charges are refunded in full, and we investigate suspected unauthorised transactions promptly. These situations sit outside the rules above.
If you are buying from Nigeria or anywhere else outside the EU and UK, the mandatory withdrawal rules above do not apply to you as a matter of law. We nevertheless apply the same standard voluntarily: no refund once the file has been downloaded; full refund within 14 days if it has not been. Sections 6 and 8 apply to you in the same way, as do any consumer protections available to you locally, including under the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2018 in Nigeria.
Please contact us before raising a chargeback with your bank or card issuer. Almost every dispute is resolved faster by email than through a payment provider. Where a chargeback is raised on a downloaded product without contact having been attempted, we will submit our delivery and consent records to the provider.
Email hello@europaguide.com with the email address used at checkout and your order reference. We reply within 4 hours during working hours and resolve refund requests within 2 business days. Approved refunds return to your original payment method, typically within 5–10 business days depending on your bank.
Note. This policy is written to reflect EU and UK consumer law as it stands at the date above. It is not legal advice, and consumer law in your own country may give you additional rights that cannot be signed away. If a court or regulator finds any part of this policy unenforceable, the remaining parts continue to apply.