A family has been left distraught after being wrongly denied boarding for a birthday flight to Copenhagen.
As reported by The Independent’s Simon Calder, they were left almost £1,300 out of pocket after a ground handler working for airline Norwegian at Gatwick Airport misinterpreted post-Brexit passport rules and prevented them from travelling.
Caroline Wright and daughter Tess had bought husband and dad Steve a surprise 60th birthday trip to the Danish capital and The Independent verified that they all arrived at the airport on Friday, February 21, with passports valid under the new post-Brexit EU rules.
On the day of outbound travel all the passports were less than 10 years old and had expiry dates at least three months after the intended day of return.
However, a Norwegian ground crew lady applied a rule that doesn’t exist, claiming that a passport, regardless of the expiry date on it, expires exactly 10 years after issue.
A family has been left distraught after being wrongly denied boarding for a birthday flight to Copenhagen. As reported by The Independent’s Simon Calder, they were left almost £1,300 out of pocket after a ground handler working for Norwegian at Gatwick Airport misinterpreted post-Brexit passport rules and prevented them from travelling
She claimed that because Steve’s passport would be 10 years old on March 31, he couldn’t travel.
Abta states that actually, as long as a passport is less than 10 years old on the day of departure, any extra months that might have been added on to it from a previous passport do count.
The Independent didn’t disclose the expiry date of Mr Wright’s passport, but said that it had seen it and verified it was ‘valid for travel out to the European Union up to the end of March for a stay of up to a month’.
Mrs Wright, from Brighton, told the publication: ‘My stress levels were through the roof.’
A Norwegian ground crew lady applied a passport rule to the Wright party that doesn’t exist
Norwegian told MailOnline Travel: ‘After looking into this, we discovered that we have indeed made a mistake and are offering Mr. Wright our sincere apologies.
‘As pointed out by Simon Calder, the rules have been hard to interpret, and in this instance, the ground personnel came to the wrong conclusion.
‘The claim sent in by the Wright family will be expedited, and they can expect a reply from us within a few days.’
As well as expiry dates and passport age, travellers should also check the specific entry requirements for the country they are visiting on the gov.uk website before travelling – the rules around passport validity vary from country to country.
For instance, while most countries such as Australia, Canada and the USA just need a passport to be valid for the length of the stay, other countries such as China, Thailand, Egypt and Turkey need at least six months.
Travellers should also count blank pages.
If their passport is filling up with stamps and there’s hardly any space left, they need to renew it – even if they’ve got several years left on it.
This is because some countries can be fussy about passports with filled pages. For instance, Italy and South Africa require at least two full blank pages.