Check Passport Stamps Before Clearing Immigration Travel Tip
By Wade Shepard on January 12, 2012, 7 comments
I run a travel question and answer service on Vagabondjourney.com, through which I’m able to gauge current trends in travel problems and difficulties that people are having on the road. Generally, there are two types of questions that come into me through this service: 1) Questions that people have when planning their trip, and 2) Questions people have about how to solve problems they’ve encountered when traveling. Of the two, the latter group is far more common.
One problem that keeps coming up is travelers receiving unintelligible or incorrect stamps in their passports as they pass through immigration. All too often, I receive a question from someone who all of a sudden realizes — sometimes months from the day they entered a country — that their entry stamp is either unreadable, incorrect, or was never there to begin with. They then find themselves with a potentially big problem, as the proof of their entry into a country is either erroneous or doesn’t exist. This can lead to major difficulties when trying to exit the country, as their entry visa is often checked prior to being permitted to leave.
Passport stamps are sometimes a mess
Immigration officials screw up more times than I care to even consider, their work truly needs to be double checked, as it is the traveler that will eat the consequences of their errors. The biggest mistake I’ve observed immigration officials make is that they don’t ink their stamps well enough before placing a visa into a passport or they forget to stamp a passport at all. I’ve seen this happen various times — one time I even got stamped into Mexico twice. Another error is that they stamp the wrong date into a passport — which is sometimes off by years. To curb all of these errors only takes a simple move:
Before walking away from an immigration desk check the stamps you just received in your passport. If there are any errors ask to have them fixed on the spot, if the stamp is too light to read or is otherwise illegible ask for another.
It blows my mind how often travelers just take their passports and shove them into their pockets and run off before looking at the stamp they just received. I understand this move: who wants to stand in front of a stone faced immigration official for any longer than they have to? But the few seconds it takes to check an immigration stamp for legibility and correctness can save many problems farther down the road.
Checking immigration stamps on location should be part of any traveler’s standard operating procedure.
Filed under: Travel Tips,
Visas,
Immigration,
Passport Stamps,
Visa Stamps
|
|
| Share
|
Read Vagabond Journey in your email!
|
Related Articles
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
That is a really great tip! I had that problem in Sweden, because there was no official there when I entered full stop! So … no stamp.
Man, that is a tough situation. Where did you enter from? What happened when you tried to leave the Schengen area?
Awesome tip! I’ve never had a problem, but no stamp/wrong stamp can cause unbelievable problems, even jail time. I always step away from the booth and then check my passport before moving on.
That’s a real good call, especially when traveling with a family and handing your passports over all together. It is all too easy for the immigration official to stamp one passport twice and another not at all or some other screw up in such circumstances.
To think that your holiday can be almost ruined because of a stamp. Just because the immigration officer did not have enough ink of the stamp can potential land you in trouble. Now I will always make sure the stamp is stamped on properly before I leave the counter. Thanks for your advice!
Damn right. From early on in my travels I got into the habit of checking what has just been stamped, on the advice of ‘old school’ travel guides talking about hardcore overland travel in places like the Congo, and didn’t encounter problems until later years. One was a mistake, one was an inking smear leading to an error, and one incident I believe was a nice little scam going on between airport immigration officers and an extension office in Kathmandu. The first I got sorted there and then (the month had just rolled over, but the Thai immigration woman’s stamp was still on last month). I jogged back right away to get it recitifed in the most face saving way I could manage for her. The second, a smeared number on a Thai entry stamp meant ‘I’ read it wrong and overstayed by 2-3 days because I thought it was another number (result = small fine and a black mark of writing in my passport for thai immigration on future visits).
The third, a case of buying a 30 days visa on arrival in Kathmandu but noticing much later in my trip that the immigration officer had used his ‘disgression’ to scribble an ending date of 27 days, rather than the full 30 I’d payed for. I hadn’t seen this writing until much later on in the trip, by which time it was too late. The extension office didn’t accept my claim that this should not have even happened in the first place considering I’d payed for 30 days, and my flight date was already set for a couple of days later meaning there was no way out of this.
It meant an extension, an extension at a minimum of 30 days being bought as standard, at the price of US$25 of course (what I’d payed for what ended up as 27 days). Ripoff, and I was not impressed by what to this day I believe was a nice little earner between corrupt beauracrats, post ‘Kingdom’.
For sure, immigration officers act more or less with impunity and rarely face the consequences of mistakes and errors (or so it’s my impression). Maybe only 1 out of 100 times will they mess up but when they do it is a big hassle — as you’ve found out! Gotta check their work. Thanks for the confirmation on this tip.