For the past five months I have found myself in the absurd position of lobbying airlines and holiday companies to follow the actual post-Brexit EU passport rules and stop causing harm to customers by inventing their own versions.
Let’s start at the beginning. Wanting to leave the European Union is a perfectly legitimate political position. But from a travel perspective Brexit has had huge costs for UK visitors to the EU. The coronavirus pandemic camouflaged the ill-effects for a while, but they are now plain for all to see.
Some are strictly economic: big providers will start charging this summer for mobile phone roaming in Europe. But the most damage is being done right now: holidays and family visits scuppered by really annoying passport validity rules. (Don’t believe some Leavers’ rhetoric that these were imposed to punish us; they were designed when the UK was part of the EU, and we asked to become subject to them.)
While your passport is still valid up to and including its expiry date for travel to the US, Australia and many other nations, for travel to the European Union it must pass two more stringent tests:
-
On the day of entry to the EU: issued less than 10 years ago (for travel today, your passport must be dated 30 April 2012 or later).
- On the intended day of return from the EU: at least three months before expiry.
That is all. The rules are independent of each other, so your passport can celebrate its 10th birthday perfectly happily in Barcelona or Berlin as long as the expiry date works.
Yet even yesterday morning I had to politely ask Tui, the biggest holiday company in Britain, to remove a misleading statement on its website telling customers their passports “need to have at least six months validity on the day of departure”.
To its credit, the Tui mistake was corrected within an hour. Britain's biggest budget airline, easyJet, also reversed a similarly false assertion at my request. The many passengers denied boarding on easyJet flights when they should have been allowed to travel can now apply for recompense. On my scorecard only Ryanair is holding out with its own bizarre interpretation of European rules – with more future compensation claims racking up as each day passes. I have asked the Civil Aviation Authority and Airlines UK to intervene. But I really shouldn’t need to. International travel is tough enough already without inventing passport rules.
