My 16-year-old son is heading to a summer program in Jersey from the US. This will be his first time traveling alone internationally, so I'm a little anxious. (He is entirely confident, of course!) I want to make sure he knows the process for moving self and luggage through passport control & customs. I don't travel internationally very often and I am a little fuzzy on the Schengen v. non-Schengen implications for US travelers. And I have booked the trip on two separate reservations, just to make it a bit more challenging and fun for him.
He is flying to Amsterdam on a direct KLM flight from the US, arriving at 6:00AM. Later that day, he has a separate reservation on Flybe to Jersey, connecting in Southampton:
- Departing AMS 1:50pm, Arriving SOU 2:10
- Departing SOU 4:05pm
I think that the sequence in Amsterdam would be to go through passport control, collect his bag, clear customs, and then find his way to the Flybe counter to re-check his bag and get his boarding passes to Jersey. At that point he would need to re-enter airport security and find his gate. My distant memory of the Amsterdam airport is that there isn't really a place to wait right at the gate, so he would have to find another place to "lounge" (and, ideally, not fall asleep and miss his flight. Or lose his passport, or have his phone or wallet stolen, or take a side trip into Amsterdam to buy weed, or run away to join the circus, or do anything else that a parent might reasonably worry about.)
Ahem. My specific questions:
- Is there anything he should be concerned or know about, or have I missed a step?
- I know nothing about Flybe (except that it charges quite a bit for checked baggage!). Any cautions/tips?
- What, if any, passport-related process will he go through at Southampton when he connects to his Jersey fight? Does the non v. Schengen status matter in any way during a connecting flight? The time window is a bit tight on the way back (50 minutes), but it's a very small airport.
Thanks for any tips or guidance!