Consent Letter for child to travel with grandparents

[Ck3960]

Our 11 year old daughter is booked to go on holiday with her grandparents for 1 week to Gran Canaria from the UK. Because we are not travelling with her I understand that we need to provide a letter of consent for her to travel with them along (without her parents).

My query is whether this letter needs to be witnessed by a notary public?

Has anyone done this and did you need to get the letter witnessed?

Generally no.
There are some countries who insist their citizens have consent letters authorised by a notary but the UK isn't one of them. Do check though that the country they are going to doesn't have such a requirement.

If you check the gov website there's info and you can download/copy a template letter. Send also photocopies of your own passports and birth cert of your daughter.

(There will now be answers telling you they've travelled abroad eleventy times and never been stopped. Your parents probably won't be either. The people who are stopped and checked are more likely (rightly or wrongly) to be lone males travelling alone with children and people travelling to certain destinations.

(aside from working in this area I've travelled alone a lot with my daughter. She's now over 18 but I'd say we were stopped around half of the times we flew)

Many thanks HicLocusEst for taking the time to share your experience.

I’ve been searching online but couldn’t find any precise guidelines about the need to have the letter witnessed by a notary public. Charge to have this done is £125 so if I can avoid this cost it would be great but I obviously also want to ensure that my parents have everything they need to ensure an easy journey with no issues.

As they’re only going to travelling from the UK to Spain I would hope a consent letter signed by both of our daughters parents should be sufficient 🤞

Hi OP,

My daughters used to travel to France ever summer with their grandparents from the ages of 4 - 14. Their dad and I just used to write a really basic letter confirming their details and stating we consented to grandparents taking them out of the country from xxx date to xxx date and adding both our signatures and passport numbers at the end. Over the ten years we never had a single issue - hopefully you won't either x

I'm sure the letters will be sufficient.

I've taken DS's friend on trips with us and a letter signed by his parents - with their contact details on it - was sufficient. They also put their passport details on it. The letters weren't notarised.

Border control actually did call his parents once so make sure the parents are on standby next to their phones - we almost missed our flight when they didn't answer!

Stropalotopus83 and SourDoughToast thank you! This is really helpful and reassuring 😀