So….heading to Menorca Friday 3 July.

Preparing our stuff today and realised 8 year old daughter passport has expired. F*ck!

So…booked an appointment with passport office for Wednesday this week.

Due to age (being under 16) they can only guarantee 7 day new passport service.

So….if we plead with passport office I wonder if there is any chance to get new passport before Friday?

Bit of a learning here obviously…..

2 years ago I noticed that my passport had expired a couple of days before our holiday, mid July. Went to the Newport passport office prepared for massive queues and a nightmare experience. How wrong could I be, no queues, slick operation, friendly staff, in and out within 5 minutes, had to wait 2 hours for them to print the passport and then 5 minutes to pick it up. I came away utterly shocked at how good the service.

The answer to your question is it seems you’ll be very lucky to have a fresh child passport in hand by that day. Have they changed the rules? I remember getting two child passports on the day of the appointment a few years back.

However, as a citizen of an EU state, in theory you should be able to travel even on an expired passport, as all you need is evidence of EU citizenship and identity. Which an expired passport provides.

Ring your airline. They may allow her to board with an expired passport.

Also: https://www.gov.uk/emergency-travel-document

I predict a lot of phone calls to embassies on your part and a massive PITA. If you attend on Wednesday they will take the old passport anyhow, which may totally snooker you.

Ring them up and ask. The Durham passport office I go to are always very helpful and obliging. I reckon that they’ll renew a kids passport quickly if you need it.

How much expired?

Expired 15 Feb.

We really should have checked well in advance but we don’t travel that often and redundancy occupied attention earlier in the year….passport was not the first thing in our minds…..

Just go. Nobody will notice.

Well, we’ll just have to see if our local passport folks are sympathetic towards our cock-up. One of our daughters friends had same issue not too long ago and got a renewed passport within 2hrs.

Fingers crossed!

Went away to France last year. Assured wife my passport was fine until she checked with a week to go that it had expired 3 months before. This was around the time there were huge delays at passport offices.

I paid for the express service. Got an appointment the next day and collected it the day after. Probably helped that there is a passport office here but the point if the story is that you can get one in a couple of days if you pay the extra.

Ring your airline. They may allow her to tell you she can board with an expired passport, then when you get there, tell you she can’t.

Egf….personal experience of a particular airline?

I’d rather not risk that….given the passport office is similar 3 hrs drive from home as the airport.

Ideally we go to the passport office and come away with a renewal or worst case pick up 2 days later on way to airport….

****, ****, ****!

TBH this holiday is about me trying to redress some issues from previous holidays. 3 years ago I was waiting on test results for multiple myeloma (turned out negative) as we were about to go on holiday. I got so stressed about it I could not bring myself to head away from home ( guess a slight breakdown) and had to tell my wife and daughter I could not go…the day before we were due to go. Last year I had threat of redundancy hanging over me and was not relaxed plus pre-occupied. So…..this holiday is about me being a ‘better’ Dad to my daughter….

Well it’s not your passport that’s expired. Can you put her in kennels for the duration? Sounds like you need a break, and it would teach her to pay proper attention to important details.

The Captain….given I am 1/2 of the parents of a lovely and precious 8 year old, it’s totally the fault of us parents not to have spotted the passport issue before now.

Positive thing us we spotted it before we checked in at the airport…however it’s outwith our control now, so we are hoping the passport office are feeling generous. Fingers crossed.

Egf….personal experience of a particular airline?

No but I wouldn’t trust anything someone said down the phone. Email maybe? At least you could print it off with a name of the ‘advisor’ if ‘yes she can travel’ was the case.
I screwed up with our visa apps for India once & it cost me two 3hr trips to Birmingham!

Ah well….

Not long home from appointment at Glasgow passport office.

Unfortunately, a child cannot get same day passport renewal now. This is to support formatting child trafficking apparently.

However, the staff were great and said they would do what they could to get passport pushed through today and hopefully to courier too.

So, fingers crossed courier pitches up tomorrow or Friday AM.

Gutted that family holiday will be not as planned. Valuable lesson for us to check passport dates well in advance.

Hope this heat wave continues for another week or so……

Given the circumstances, result!