The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The hidden travel chaos lurking in your passport
From the ‘wrong’ stamps to red-wine stains and EU rules on validity, that little booklet could thwart you, says Nick Trend
With backlogs in issuing new passports causing delays of up to 10 weeks, the director general of the Passport Office warned last week that many people are applying to renew too late and risk missing out on summer holidays as a result. But even if you think you have a valid passport, you may still face problems at borders, especially in the wake of Brexit. Here are some cautionary tales.
1. THE VALIDITY TRAP
Since we left the EU, many readers have been caught out and either been turned away from the airport, or had to rush to renew their passport, because of a new quirk in the validity rules.
The UK Government has, for several years, been issuing passports with an extra few months added to the overall 10-year validity. And if a current passport was renewed before the previous one had expired, the extra months were added to the new one. But these extra months don’t count for EU countries. They put a 10-year limit on the overall validity and also require it to be valid for at least three months beyond the date of your visit.
So it is the date of issue, not expiry, that it is critical to check before your travel. For practical purposes, your passport runs out nine years and nine months after the date it was issued. The Foreign Offices says it hopes the anomaly will be sorted out “this spring” – but don’t take a risk until this is confirmed. 2. CONDEMNED TO THE SLOW LANE I have made several trips to countries in the EU and European Economic Area since Brexit arrangements came into force and in most cases I have had to queue longer at immigration than EU citizens did. The problem is that passports must now be stamped by an immigration officer, which means British passport holders can’t normally use the automatic machines.
At Bergamo, they got around the problem by stationing an officer just after the machine gates – all he had to do was administer a stamp, because the passports had already been checked. But this seems to be the exception rather than the rule: I had long waits at Zurich and Rome. By the end of September, the situation may change. The EU is planning a new entry/exit IT system (EES), which will capture your name, biometric data (fingerprints and facial images) plus the date and place of entry and exit. Whether this actually speeds things up or not remains to be seen.
3. TOO MANY STAMPS
The need for physical stamps may cause problems now if you travel regularly, perhaps for business. Until the EES system is up and running, you will use up half a page of your passport on each trip (each page only fits four stamps and some visas take up a whole page).
4. THE WRONG STAMPS
The most common problem with stamps is caused when immigration officers take issue with “souvenir” versions. These are sometimes offered to tourists at destinations such as Machu Picchu or on trips to Antarctica. But an officer who wants to be awkward can construe them as defacing an official document and so making it invalid. Even legitimate stamps can cause problems: you can’t visit the US under the usual ESTA visa waiver programme if you have travelled to North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria or Yemen.
5. DAMAGE AND DOG-EARS
After a few years, most passports suffer wear and tear. Delamination of the photo page is an obvious problem because it might suggest it has been tampered with. But damage on any page can be enough to see it rejected. One reader contacted us after her passport was refused for a visit to Mexico because it had a red wine stain on one of the pages – even though it was one of the blank ones kept free for visa stamps.