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.

@shreknjumps may charge an admin fee... depends on the airline but I'm sure it won't be a big issue

A friend got turned back just before Christmas. To rub salt into the wound the check in staff member remarked “ It’s a shame you weren’t travelling two days ago on Thursday, that was the cut off day for your passport.”

I am so so pleased for you OP. This could have been horrible and the stress you have gone through won't be forgotten. Have a great holiday and don't worry about the return, what in all reasonableness are they going to do. x

I've just seen a man managed to fly from Heathrow to New York without a ticket or passport.

Think it might be a different story if OP tried to fly today. We're flying from Heathrow tomorrow so wondering what security is going to be like.

@WhyDoesItAlways what's significant about today? And how did a man fly with no ticket? You need to elaborate!

Here's the Heathrow to New York story. https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/man-charged-flying-heathrow-new-york-without-passport-ticket/

I can imagine him sneaking through the barriers to get into security (you are meant to scan your boarding card and then a gate opens and closes, so maybe you could push through), but it takes some very special incompetence at the gate to allow a passenger on a transatlantic flight without a boarding card.

"Think it might be a different story if OP tried to fly today. We're flying from Heathrow tomorrow so wondering what security is going to be like."

What's happening today/tomorrow?

More what news story broke yesterday.

See the link in the post above

Oh right. I doubt it'll have any effect on Heathrow security now, 2 months down the line.

They'll have checked their systems back then to see how he passed through, he may even have had a boarding pass for a cheap flight and the issue lays firmly with the airline

All the news outlets are saying he didn't have a ticket or a passport, no documents at all.

I agree that security will have been tightened up at the time, but I think there will be extra tightening now as PR, in order to reassure passengers.

Yeah possibly. Not that the security staff are that great at PR 🤣. I'll let you know later on!

If it's true that this bloke tailgated a passenger who did have documents through an e-gate before security, there might be more staff hanging around those gates looking for such behaviour.

True, but that wouldn't have made a difference to the OP's story because the only thing they check at the entrance to security is that you have a valid boarding pass. The people whose job it is to stop you tailgating someone through the barrier don't know how many months you need on your passport for every destination. It's up to the airline to check that. As we saw with the OP's story, they can do that either at check-in (which is hard to do online, because even if your passport expires next week you might have a Spanish residency card) or at the gate, which they generally won't do either, especially for flights to Europe. The system is imperfect, but it doesn't matter so much for passport validity as it does for security. (And security is imperfect too, of course.)

The reason the US authorities will have been so upset about this is that they want to know the identity of everyone on the plane, via the ESTA system, as soon as it's in the air. They want to keep "known" bad people from being on a plane in US airspace. Yes, this bloke went through security, but it's not all that hard to acquire a blade (for example, from an accomplice who cuts lemons at the airside bar) between security and the gate, and that was all the 9/11 hijackers needed. As far as I know, EU countries currently don't collect that data, because they can get names but can't distinguish reliably between two John Smiths. But once ETIAS is up and running they would be able to do that if they wanted.

So how is op doing now? Are you heading home soon?

We are home!
Absolutely no problem on the way home. I know we were lucky, we only attempted the journey knowing we could easily be turned back, so the holiday really felt like a bonus. If you can handle the stress of being turned back & you have no time to renew your passport it's definitely worth a try

Absolutely great news OP . Hope you had a wonderful holiday 💕

We did!
Thank you :-)

Brilliant…you missed rain,rain rain 😂My sister staying close to Malaga and enjoying the sunshine.

Do we know what happened. Was your son allowed n got entry in Spain. I am in a similar situation where we are travelling to Denmark in 2 days n my son who is 5, his passport is valid till 26 Feb 2025 - less than 3 months

They let us in & it was all fine, but it may have been because it was so late at night & they didn't want to deal with the paperwork or the hassle of turning us back. It was incredibly stressful worrying about what would happen, but we really had no other option since we only realised the night before. If you have no time to get a new passport it's worth a try, but just accept you might be turned away boarding the plane, or on arrival at your destination, so try and be prepared for that. I don't know if your destination has the same rules so that is worth checking too.

Good luck 🍀

I don't know if your destination has the same rules

Spain and Denmark are both in Schengen, like the whole of the EU apart from Ireland and Cyprus (and Cyprus applies the Schengen rules in practice). So yes, the same rules will apply. But the officials may be more or less inclined to make an exception. Fingers crossed!