For those who didn’t know or have been blessed by not having to renew their French residence cards this year, the system was reformed and the change has been rocky. Like most good intentions, they sometimes end up causing more issues (and paving the way to hell). The new appointment system sounds good on paper - you have to get an appointment online for the actual renewal and your file gets seen and processed right there in front of you. Reality proves the system is far from working and we want to share with you some lessons we would have loved to have known before starting this process.

1. It is not the staff’s fault - they are just making the best out of the new system and trying to find solutions along the way. Even at the institutional level, the new process is finding issues like us receiving the wrong information from a temporary receptionist who did not work at the Bureau des Étrangers and the director of our branch (Sous Prefecture de Nogent Sur Marne) apologized to us for the mistake while making an exception for our situation. Why? According to an article of Le Parisien published last month - there are about 50 lawsuits against the state because they cannot get an appointment. The staff of the Bureau des Étrangers are making the best they can with a faulty system…even if it means slapping the hand of their coworkers from the Prefecture. And talking about being given the wrong information by a receptionist…

2. Always ask the right people - the director explained about the exception they made for our problem because they know as an institution they are fully liable for allowing the general receptionist of the branch to give us the wrong information. So, as much as it may suck to waste time, ask for information from Bureau des Étrangers directly. The receptionist had no right to answer what he did not know about as the director explained it to us.

3. It is possible to find appointments - from previous experience with appointment systems, there is a point in the day when the next available spaces are released at once. In the case of our region - Val-de-Marne - the time the appointment servers releases new slots is at midnight. You will only have about 5 minutes before all the time slots get taken and the servers may crash as more and more people are aware there is only a 5 minute widow per day for this crucial step.

4. When booking your appointment, have all the information ready next to you to fill out every box - another particularly curious thing is the personal information form. There are about 6-7 boxes and only 3 have required notices on them. All boxes are required or you will get an error code. We wasted a trip to the Prefecture to learn this bit.

5. You better start the renewal process 4 to 5 months before your card expires - appointments for our Bureau des Étrangers are about 2 months away. When we finally figured out last August that appointments can only be made at midnight, the next available date was in exactly 2 months away in October. While researching information for this article on Nov 20th, the next date available was January 15th. So, if you want to save yourself the pain of getting an extension of your residence card because your appointment comes after the expiration date of your documents, start earlier…at least with the appointment.

6. You can’t travel with the extension of your card - unless your appointment is before the expiration date of your card, don’t plan to travel. The extension does not allow you to travel, just to remain legal in France until your appointment date. We found this the hard way.

7. Breathe - yes, this is not the most obvious lesson we learned throughout this whole process. But this new system to renew your residence will test you, it will exasperate you, it will make you laugh or cry or both at the same time like it did for us. Find something to help you cope or vent. Trust me, this article comes about 6 weeks after our appointment and the action of sharing these experiences has a cathartic feeling to us.

I hope that these lessons from us going through this process can shed some light into this endeavor for you or at least to demystify it. In the end, just to do research while writing this article, we managed to find one appointment on our first try. And, remember you are not alone and, when in doubt, go and ask your local Prefecture for information. It is your right to get the information to correctly follow the new procedure for renewing your residence documents. Just make sure you ask thoroughly the right people.