A traveller has told of his anger and frustration after airport officials misinterpreted post-Brexit passport rules and wrongly denied him boarding for a holiday flight.
Grant Hardy told MailOnline Travel that he and his wife were left around £4,000 out of pocket after Swissport officials at Jersey Airport applied a rule that doesn’t exist to his passport expiry status and refused to let him board a Smartwings flight to Tenerife.
Mr Hardy, who lives on Guernsey and works for a telecom company, arrived at the airport on February 21 with a passport that MailOnline has seen and can confirm was valid under new EU entry rules.
It was less than 10 years old, having been issued on March 27, 2015, and had an expiry date at least three months after the planned date of return on February 28.
In fact, it had eight months of validity, with an expiry date in October.
To double check, we inputted Mr Hardy’s passport details into the Tui passport checker and it cleared him for the flight.
However, when Mr Hardy presented his passport for inspection, he claims that an official told him his passport ‘runs out after 10 years’ and that ‘the additional months were not valid in the EU’.
A traveller has told of his anger and frustration after airport officials misinterpreted post-Brexit passport rules and wrongly denied him boarding for a holiday flight
As Abta states, this is not true.
The trade association explains: ‘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 couple found themselves stranded in Jersey overnight and had to take a flight back home, which cost them ‘several hundred pounds’ in addition to the money they had lost on their holiday.
Mr Hardy said that insurance didn’t cover the incident and told MailOnline that their anger was compounded by a Swissport official summoning the police at the airport, then Swissport ‘stonewalling’ him when he complained afterwards.
Mr Hardy said: ‘[Swissport] acted appallingly and when I showed them the documentation and asked to video their response as they would not accept the [passport] information on the government website, they called the police. I was publicly questioned at the airport for a disturbance, which was absolutely not the case.
‘I was respectful and polite throughout and didn’t even raise my voice. I just stood my ground.
Grant Hardy told MailOnline Travel that he and his wife were left around £4,000 out of pocket after Swissport officials at Jersey Airport (above) applied a rule that doesn’t exist to his passport expiry status and refused to let him board a Smartwings flight to Tenerife
‘In fact, the policeman shook my hand and wished me well. Swissport will not engage with me. It has not offered details of why I was refused boarding, or offered an apology.
‘I have only had one email from them, saying I should contact the airline.’
He added: ‘Swissport’s misapplication of travel regulations appears to be a system-wide issue. A taxi driver at the airport told me this had happened to multiple passengers in the past two weeks.’
When MailOnline asked Swissport to comment, it continued to deny that it had been in the wrong.
A Swissport spokesperson said: ‘Our teams adhere to official travel document guidelines to ensure compliance with the entry restrictions of the destination. We have investigated this incident and the decision to deny boarding was in line with the available guidance on Schengen rules.’
Mr Hardy’s experience mirrors that of the Wright family at Gatwick Airport, as we reported.
They were left almost £1,300 out of pocket after a ground handler working for airline Norwegian at Gatwick misinterpreted the post-Brexit 10-year passport rules and prevented them from travelling.
Norwegian subsequently apologised, telling MailOnline: ‘After looking into this, we discovered that we made a mistake.’
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.
