We're leaving for Italy next week on Lufthansa air with a layover Frankfurt, Germany. My travel agent says we will go through customs in Germany, and none in Italy? Can that be right? Does that mean we get no travel stamp on our passports that show we've been to Italy?
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Lakewood, Colorado
19274 posts
Customs and Immigration are two different things. Immigration stamps your passport; customs checks the content of your bags for taxed or prohibited items. If getting a travel stamp on your passpost is your only goal, you are going to be disappointed. The day when Europe was a collection of immigartion zone, and you could collect stamps like people used to put decals in the window of the car for everywhere they had been, is over. Most of Europe is now one big immigration zone, called the Schengen zone. Kind of like the United States. You get your passpost stamped when you enter the US, not when you go into each state. When you enter Schengen, in Frankfurt, you'll get your passpost stamped, and it will be stamped again when you leave Schengen, from wherever. Customs is only enforced when you bring your belongings into the European Union. If you connect in Frankfurt but check your baggage through to Rome, you will only go through customs in Rome. But customs doesn't stamp your passport. And, today customs is a formality. Normally there is a lane going out of the room labeled "nothing to declared". You could be spot checked while going through this lane, but in 25 years I never have been.