I’m on a lot of social media travel sites just lurking and twice this past weekend I saw a report from two different people who got to Europe with expired passports.
You’re probably trying to figure out how this happens. It’s pretty easy.
One. If you were renew online, they no longer deface your old passport. You just get a new one so you have two passports, and neither one of them have holes punched in them or something that automatically will tell you this is not the current passport.
Two, if you check in on your airline online, you put in all the passport information you scan it, etc. and they see it and they know you’ve got a valid passport. They’re happy
Three yes at the gate, they generally check passports, but what they’re really looking at is that you have the passport and it’s signed they don’t check the expiration date. You’ve already submitted all that to the airline and they were happy and the agent’s system tells them that. They are trying to get you boarded on the plane in a hurry so you’ve got this old passport that expired a month ago that has no evidence of damage they won’t notice.
Unfortunately when you get there this shows up. One man was desperately trying to figure out what to do about his wife who was in a holding room at CDG. The other was allowed to enter as the passport expired in a few days but they took away the passport, gave them an official statement explaining why they didn’t have a passport and told them to go to the embassy the next day. This couple actually had a neighbor FedEx them the new passport