Time for tactical passports.
Kevlar, Baby…
This site has a Kevlar passport holder.
I wouldn’t actually count on it though.
And Jesus wept.
I still really, really want to hear how a hotel “mistakenly” shredded more than 40 passports. How did they even have them in the first place? Were they keeping them in the hotel safe? Did they somehow get mixed in with old hotel financial records on the day a shredding service came? Even if you thought that your gigantic foreign tour group had somehow left without their passports, why would you shred them?? It’s not like they won’t be needing them pretty soon!
Also, who’s going to be paying for over 40 people to stay for extra days? There are hotel and food costs, airline ticket change fees, and I saw that the fees to replace the passports totaled $180 each. I’m assuming the hotel will end up covering all those expenses, and they should probably be thanking their lucky stars that there aren’t any American parents involved, given our general litigiousness.
I did renew my Suburban but the stickers and slip never arrived – stolen out of the mail box most likely. I kept meaning to contact the DMV about it but kept putting it off until two years passed and I had to renew again. It wasn’t my daily driver but I’d take it out once a month or so, including a run to Burning Man, 900-miles each way. Never got pulled over.
Oh, they are certainly getting sued. It’s not as though Brits don’t know the way things work over here, or that attorneys here won’t have noticed and be pitching for the business with this many involved.
Sounds like the British Embassy in New York covered everything except the passport fees. They certainly paid for sightseeing.
I’m pretty sure that would be after asking the lodge for reimbursements and they refuse.
This is what gets me. I am in a foreign country and I hand my passport over to the desk clerk to hold on to? Sorry, not happening.
I went to Mexico recently and we kept our passports in a safe in the hotel room. We didn’t want anyone touching them.
It’s actually quite common in Europe (certainly in Italy last I was there) for hotels to require you to store your passport with them. Insurance against you skipping sans paying I suppose.
What do they do about all the people traveling within Europe but without a passport? Do they only require passports from people they know will need them to get to and from their home to the hotel?
I don’t know enough about the EU/Schengen Area to know how easy it is to collect from someone that lives across a border, but I assume it would be akin to a hotel in California requiring passports from people coming from out of the country, but not someone coming from Chicago.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s no longer common because of the EU. It was certainly unremarkable before then.
I’ll be in Italy in May and will report back. I’m from the US, so either the hotel won’t ask for my passport, or they will because I’m non-EU.
I was in Thailand in December, and nobody outside of an airport wants your passport in my experience.
That’s what I was thinking when I read the story, “An American Hotel collecting your passport? I thought that was a European thing.”
I could imagine maybe a teacher in charge of 40 kids thinking it was a good idea to collect all the passports and ask the hotel to put them in its safe? But I think many U.S. hotels would refuse, they don’t want the liability. They don’t want to be responsible for exactly this outcome.
That still doesn’t explain who decided to destroy all the passports or why.
There are many, MANY people out this way who would not recognize a passport or know that it is important. The level of willful ignorance out this way is just gobsmacking, and the schools teach for the level of education that PAB liked.
My daughter’s going on a school trip to Italy soon. There are no in-room safes, so the teachers will indeed be collecting all passports and keeping them in the hotel safe.
I don’t know what “PAB” means in this context.