If you're unlucky, your request for a visitor's visa to go to the UK may be denied because "you plan a holiday for no particular purpose other than sightseeing." Apparently there's been some pretty ridiculous reasons given for denied visas:

• [Some people were] turned down because they had never previously taken any foreign travel or could not speak English.
  
  
• A common reason for refusal was "you wish to go to the UK for a holiday. You have never previously undertaken any foreign travel before and I can see little reason for this trip".
  
  
• She also highlights the case of a person whose request was rejected by an officer because they had "little or no idea what you plan to see or do". This was, she discloses, because the person had answered the question on a form asking why they were going to the UK, with the words "annual leave vacation".
  
  
• An applicant in St Petersburg wrote: "I just want a holiday, my friends live near the seaside" to which the officer wrote "you have not named any places you will see".
  
  
• In one case, a man was refused a visa because the officer thought it not credible that he was going to stay in a hotel in Cirencester "far from [his] friends in Surrey and Kent". The hotel was in fact in London and the man had told the officer that he had not wanted to put a burden on his friends for his entire 28-day visit.

Mrs Costelloe Baker, who is independent but appointed by the Foreign Office, concluded that overall "there has been a significant improvement in the quality of UKvisas work compared with 2005 and I have found that refusal notices are more consistent and less idiosyncratic".

So apparently you must speak English, have a specific set of places or friends to visit, and do something besides sightseeing. And also this is better than the application office used to be? What did they used to do, just write "I don't think so" in big red letters across the application regardless of what was on it?