BY BEN KERRIGAN
Tens of thousands of British travelers with a u.k passport scheduled to take business flights to the U.S, will face travel night mares this summer. The inconvenient hassle is being caused by a new rule introduced last month, which is still not widely known.
The rule requires anyone without a biometric passport is from now on ineligible to travel to America without a visa – regardless of any on line permission they may have to visit the US.
A number of Brits have already been turned down at Heathrow airport for having the wrong type of passport, forfeiting their air tickets in the process and being left feeling dejected and lost for words.
The required chip which contains an electronic chip with personal data, was introduced in the spring of 2007 and can be easily identified from the front cover of the passport. If your passport features a rectangle bisected by a horizontal line, with a circle in the middle, then it is biometric and you are safe.If it doesn’t , you are stuffed because you won’t be boarding any plane, but losing your money.
UK tabloid, the Independent, has calculated over 1.3m of such passport to still be in use. About 80,000 people are estimated to be at risk of being denied boarding.
The change was not promulgated to the public, but silently introduced in the Terrorist Travel Prevention Act, 2015. The U.S authorities and the travel industry have jointly been criticized by affected parties for not doing enough to alert the public about the new rule.
“All it needed was for Thomson to run a report from their database for people traveling to the US from 1 April,” An affected passenger, Mr Ryan told the Independent “
“All it needed was for Thomson to run a report from their database for people traveling to the US from 1 April,
That would enable them to send a courtesy email to notify people who had already booked – possibly like us, a year in advance.”
The situation is a sad state of affairs, though we must trust the U.S authorities to figure out a way to remedy the situation y at least either recompensing them their fares or affording them a delayed trip in the future. Alternatively, the airlines can take on the task of rectifying the solution. It will be quite farcical if passengers are left to pick up the pieces with no compensation available to them.
The U.S government don’t mess about when it comes entry requirements to their country. And their rules are set to be even more stringent if the extremely tough and controversial Republican, Donald Trump assumes power in the next elections.
Exactly why the biometric type passport is being imposed as a requirement is uncertain, but it will have something to do with the perceived need to be able to track every person on the planet. This is most likely to effectively contain terrorism.
