posted by Travel Cat on Aug 7
Travel With Kids Series - Essential Documents - Part 1
It’s not only a passport that is important when travelling abroad, there are another half dozen or more documents that need checking and updating before travelling anyway - then one or more extra if you travel with your kids.
Here, we start with the 3 basics - which no family can travel without.
Your Passports:
As adults, we know that once we get our passport all we need to worry about is that it needs to be valid for at least 6 months AFTER we return from a holiday. In general, you can’t travel into another country on an adult passport with less than 6 months remaining on it.
However, kids passport restrictions are a bit more volatile due to the fact that babies and small children look different every year - a baby in a photo could grow up to be just about any 10 year old. There is no way to prove one way or another - unless the photos are constantly updated throughout your kids life.
Regardless of the requirements of your home country for children’s passports, you need to check the entry requirements of the country you are visiting. Either way, it is advised that you carry current passport photos of your kids when travelling in case replacements are required at any time or for whatever reason.
In the UK, a child’s passport runs for 5 years and they can keep the same photo for that whole 5 years, and my nephew recently travelled with a baby photo on his passport when he was 4 years, 3 months old.
Kids are considered an adult from 16 in passport terms, and the renewal cost for each passport is the same, even if they do not run continually for you child’s life - therefore if you can leave time between renewals without affecting your travel - this could save you quite some money.
Top Tip - Your passport details will always be required for visa forms given out at airports or on planes when arriving or leaving a destination. It is therefore a good idea to have a small piece of card to hand with all the passport details on for yourself and your children to avoid getting the actual passports out all the time, and fiddling with the pages and numbers while watching after your children.
The Visas:
Most visas are completed on the plane on the way there, or at the airport itself in a massive queue, but some need to be applied for in advance - up to 3 months in advance for some. There are visas that can be applied for either way, and applying in advance will save you queueing up with everyone else who was on your plane when you arrive there after the long flight - with you kids needing the bathroom and you needing to sleep!!
It’s also possible that to get the visa in advance you will need to send off your passports to the countries embassy to get stamped. This will obviously need to be done way in advance to make sure that they are returned to you before you depart. You could debate taking them to the embassy yourself to save the postal risk, if you find that that is an option for you.
Your Tickets:
Your tickets are obviously essential for your travel, so make sure that they are kept in a secure and waterproof wallet throughout your journey, and preferably get a copy of them if possible and keep the originals in a safe at your destination or at least in a body wallet while travelling. Put any important details on your passport ‘card’ if necessary to avoid getting them out while travelling.
Some tickets these days are e-tickets and are not even an actual ’ticket’, they are just your printed itinerary on a sheet of A4 paper. For this reason - keep them really safe so they are not lost amongst others paperwork, in-case they get discarded.
Either way - on receiving the printed paperwork or email - always make sure that every single detail is correct for both the outward and return journey straight after booking - and contact the agent as soon as possible if there are any discrepancies. I once booked a return flight, only to find out that the outward and return airports were different!
I had assumed on booking the return flight from one country back to that same country that it was from and to the same airport. Added to this, the agent made no attempt to advise me of the rather odd routing by way of warning.
It was a good job I checked the details asap - as this could have been a disaster if I was leaving my car parked at the departure airport, or had brought a return train ticket from that one place.
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