Urgent advice needed!! Passport expiration time

[NSWK]

We are travelling last minute (hopefully) to Spain tomorrow for half term, and have just realised our child's passport has two months and three weeks until it expires. It looks like we need to have a full three months on a child's passport to travel. We have only just realised this and are travelling tomorrow afternoon so it is too late to renew the passport.

Does anyone have any experience? We are hoping to fly with BA from Gatwick to Malaga, both parent's passports have, in excess of, 6 months. Is there a chance they will let us fly (we are only going for five days) or are we mad to even go to the airport?

Thank you in advance, all advice gratefully received.

Hope you manage to go OP!

I’m so over invested in this 🤞 🍀

Everything crossed OP X

Quick get another cocktail before you have to board

Also, because you checked in online, taking hand luggage only means that you will avoid having your passports checked at bag drop. Excellent planning. Got everything crossed here.

OP's flight has been delayed until 21:00, what a nightmare. Keeping fingers crossed.

Another invested in this thread!

I suspect that was done precisely because many people would otherwise have fallen foul of the rather complicated two-stage Schengen entry rules:

• Passport must be less than 10 years old on day of entry
• Passport must be valid (it's OK if it has become older than 10 years by that point) on planned day of exit

The deal whereby you got up to 9 extra months added on if you renewed early was a nice thing for the government to do, but I suspect that a few people ran into problems because of it in non-EU countries prior to Brexit too. On paper a good idea, but actually an accident waiting to happen. I don't know of another country that ever did this.

Good luck OP!

Good luck 🤞🤞

We are on the plane!!!!!!!
No idea what will happen when we get there (& my phone is running low so I might not be able to post) but please keep wishing us luck!!🍀

So pleased. Hope it continues to go well!

Omg well done and good luck in Spain!!! Malaga was quite relaxed when we went in Oct x

Brilliant!!!! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 good luck the other side

Omg excellent. I think arriving late at night, hopefully they will let you off. Crossing fingers !

Great news, OP! Fingers crossed for you. 🤞🏻🍀

I'm so invested in this and really hope you get through passport control at the other end!! Sending lots of luck 🍀

Ooh, let us know when you arrive! I'm going to be waking up all night checking this thread 😆

Crikey! That’s not what I expected to happen! Hope it all goes smoothly on landing 🤞🏻

I'm pretty sure that OP is in the air and this is her flight (Gatwick-Malaga checks out, as does the 90-minute delay): https://www.flightradar24.com/VLG93BM/33f00247

Scheduled arrival is 23:20 local time, 10:20 pm UK time, so I guess all we can do now is have a cup of tea and cross our fingers a few times.

We're in france for half term and ever since I found your post I can't stop thinking about this thread. We've been discussing it over dinner too. Good luck on the other end op 🤞🍀

I screenshotted ops last update and sent it to dh as we had been discussing it haha both routing for you op

Correction: ETA is 00:30 local time, 11:30pm UK time. Maybe we should be having cocoa instead of tea.

As a minimum OP's family are getting one night in Spain, because even if they are refused entry they won't be flying back tonight.

Straight to FR 😂

Bloody hell, did not expect that. All the best at Spanish passport control!