A U.S. citizen flies from London to Helsinki, Finland, connecting in Stockholm or Copenhagen.
Is his passport stamped in Sweden or Denmark?
I flew from Toronto to Helsinki via Copenhagen and I did not see Customs and Immigration until I got to Helsinki. P presume it would be similar for people departing from the US.
Within Europe? From London it would probably be the same, since the UK is outside the Schengen border-free zone.
When I flew to Prague via Frankfurt in 2006, my passport was not stamped in Germany.
For a simple transfer, you don’t usually go through customs or immigration. I don’t want to answer definitively, but in all my travels, I’ve never been stamped at a layover, unless I left the airport to hop into the city for a moment. It wouldn’t really make sense to me to require passengers to go through immigration on a layover, and I imagine it would screw with the scheduling of connecting flights. Airports have very well defined areas where people who have not been cleared by immigration can go and where they can’t.
Furthermore, it’d be really irritating (to me) to get stamped at every layover airport because that fills up your passport pages rather quickly. (My last passport hardly had any space left for stamps.)
Transit passengers (those making connections) do not clear customs or passport control in the connecting country. They generally may not leave the secured area of the airport, although on at least one occasion I experienced, passengers were required to deplane and then pass through security again. I have made this type of connection about 8 times in the past few years, including stops in Paris, Zurich, Athens. You clear customs and get your passport stamped at the first port of entry into your destination country (i.e., if you fly to Rome then connect to Florence, you clear customs in Rome).
The United States does it differently, which may have prompted the original question. In US airports, there’s no such thing as “in transit”: people flying from one country to another via the US must go through US immigration (including having an appropriate visa, if not eligible because of citizenship or criminal record for a visa waiver).
Wow. It seemed rather odd to me that you would need a visa to catch a connecting flight in the US, but sure enough… What a royal pain in the ass.
When I flew to Stockholm via Reykjavik, my passport was stamped in Iceland but I could leave the Stockholm airport without even going through immigration (downright weird for an American – it felt like I was doing something naughty!)
It might depend on whether you are getting onto a purely domestic/nordic flight or a ‘stopping’ flight from elsewhere that is in the ‘international’ bit of the terminal.
A few years ago I flew London-Stockholm changing at Copenhagen and the immigration was in the middle of the terminal with “Nordic” (basically domestic) at one end and “international” (from wacky places like the UK) at the other. If I’d had a non-EEA passport I think it have been stamped In Denmark, since that’s where it was checked.
Similarly Stockholm/Helsinki is basically a domestic route - you hit the taxi rank 2 mins after stepping off the plane with never a sign of a passport check. Doing Helsinki/London via Arlanda I seem to recall the first passport control being in Stockholm.
This was 3-4 years ago, but I doubt things have changed much.
When I did it just last month, flying Cincinnati through Frankfurt to St. Petersburg I was stamped in Frankfurt as well as St. Petersburg. When I did it previously going CVG to FRA to Helsinki, I was stamped in Frankfurt, but not in Helsinki. I got an exit stamp from Finland and an entry stamp from Russia when I drove across the border. The same thing happened when I flew through CDG in Paris to Helsinki, I got stamped at CDG but not at HEL.
I believe that the entry stamp comes on your first arrival to a European Union country. After that it’s an open gangway until you leave the EU. On your departure you get stamped again. I may be wrong, but I’m looking at my passport right now, and that’s what it looks like.
I flew from Dallas to Prague via London in December 07… I didn’t get stamped until I got to Prague.
On the way back, we spent a few days in London, so I got stamped coming into the UK that time.
Not entirely true:
If you are flying from New York to Stuttgart, with a connection in Amsterdam, you go through passport control in Amsterdam but customs in Stuttgart. That’s because the Netherlands and Germany are both part of Schengen. You go through passport control at your first entry into Schengen, which is any of 15 countries in Europe.
Ed
Ah, yes, good point. I don’t think I’ve ever had a layover in a Schengen country en route to another Schengen country, so I would never have experienced this. That would make sense.
So the answer to the OP’s question seems to be that, yes, the passport is stamped in Copenhagen or Sweden, as Finland, Sweden, and Denmark are all Schengen countries.
Thanks for all the answers so far.
What was the passport procedure before the Schengen Agreement was implemented in 1990?
There is one exception to this: People flying from Auckland to London Heathrow (or vice-versa) on the Air New Zealand service via Los Angeles do not have to clear customs & immigration in the US- there is a transit lounge at LAX for them. Typically they’re on the ground for an hour and a half to two hours while the plane is refuelled, serviced, and the crews swap over before re-boarding and heading on to either London or Auckland. Most people are usually glad for the chance to stretch their legs, although the transit lounge is really, really boring and doesn’t have any proper shops or anything in it.