Can you imagine how you’d feel if you arrived at Dublin Airport full of excitement for a once-in-a-lifetime (and wildly expensive) holiday, only to be sent packing at the check-in desk by an airline after a member of its staff spotted a blemish on your passport that they – or the machines they were using – didn’t like the look of?
Well, a couple who contacted Pricewatch last week don’t have to imagine the horror of it all because they lived through the experience earlier this month, courtesy of Emirates.
“Earlier this year, my wife and I booked a post-retirement, ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ guided tour to India [and] paid €6,498 for the package [with the] flights arranged through Emirates,” starts the mail from Paul.
When they arrived at the check-in desk on the evening of Monday, October 14th, the check-in staff detected what Paul describes as a “minor imperfection” on his wife Aileen’s passport and “declined to provide us with boarding passes”.
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His mail includes a jpeg image of the passport and, if you look carefully, you will notice the slight imperfection in the bottom left corner.
“We explained to the supervisor at the Emirates check-in that this imperfection has been present for over three years and had never posed a problem previously. In the past year alone [my wife] has travelled to Australia, to the US (twice), to Rome and to Lanzarote (twice) on this passport,” he writes.
“We calculate that the passport would have been processed by airlines and by immigration officials on at least 36 occasions over this 12-month period without a problem. Emirates had no issue with her passport when she travelled with them from Dublin to Australia and back in March/April 2024. In recent weeks, the Indian authorities were happy with her passport when issuing Aileen with a visa for her Indian trip. These arguments all fell on deaf ears on Monday evening.”
Since then the couple have tried to get a reimbursement of their aborted holiday from their travel insurance company.
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“One of the things that they require is a formal statement from Emirates regarding the circumstances surrounding its refusal to allow us to fly. However, Customer Services at Emirates tell us that its computer system documents us as ‘no shows’, implying that we either failed to present ourselves for check-in or did so after the gate had closed. For the record, we attended the check-in desk at 18h20 for a 22h10 flight,” Paul writes.
He says he is now trying to contact the office of the Data Protection Commissioner to “see if they can oblige Emirates to correct the misinformation on its database. We have also tried to contact the DAA to see if it can provide CCTV or other evidence of our presentation to the check-in desk in Terminal 2 on Monday evening.”
He says we can “probably guess our level of frustration and anger around all of this. I have no doubt that the Emirates check-in staff made a poor decision on Monday evening. The manner in which we’ve been subsequently treated since has greatly increased our sense of grievance.”
We sent this story to Emirates and got a response back which could – most kindly – be described as terse: “Emirates wants all of its customers to have the best experience possible when travelling but unfortunately, passengers with damaged passports that are not machine readable are not permitted to travel.”
We couldn’t help but notice that the airline did not ask to see a picture of the passport in question (although we had offered to send them one), nor did it address how our reader was able to travel on the same passport with the same airline to Australia earlier this year despite the imperfection being on it then too.
It also did not address one of the central concerns of our reader, which was a request that the record be changed as, whatever about the state of the passport, to describe the couple as a “no show” does not appear to us to be an accurate reflection of what happened.
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We put these points to the airline. It came back with a follow-up statement which reiterated the points made in the original one and added the following: “We understand the passenger travelled on their damaged passport earlier this year but unfortunately, it’s impossible for us to know if the passport quality has diminished or the extent of the damage has increased over the past number of months.
“What we can confirm is that on the day of travel on October 14th, the passport could not be scanned and was therefore rejected.”
The statement pointed out that the “instruction from the Department of Foreign Affairs is: ‘If a passport has been damaged you will need to return the damaged passport when you are making an application for a replacement. If your passport is damaged do not travel on it. It may cause difficulties when you are crossing international borders.’”
The statement concluded by saying Emirates “will provide the passenger with a letter advising that their passport could not be scanned at check-in.”
If nothing else, this story should serve as a reminder to all readers to check their passports carefully and make sure that no chances are taken at check-in if there are any blemishes, however slight.
