Meant to ask this question several months back after my first trip to Europe.
After a few days in London and Paris, I flew on easyjet from Paris’ Orly airport to Rome’s Ciampino airport. In Paris, I just went through a regular security check, and in Rome, I walked unimpeded from the terminal to the curb and caught a cab. It only later occurred to me that I hadn’t encountered any immigration officials that day. My passport bears this out…no stamps from that leg of the trip.
I flew out of a different airport (Fuimicino) a few days later, and my passport was stamped there, and again when I got back to New York. (And for the record, it was also stamped at Waterloo station in London on my way to Paris.) So why not at Ciampino? Or did I just get lucky and walk through the wrong door?
I’d say no. France and Italy are signatories to the Schengen Agreement, meaning that once you are cleared to enter one of the countries (that is, when you entered France from the UK) you are effectively cleared to enter them all.
Once you arrived in France, you were inside the Schengen customs union. There are no internal border controls between France and other Schengen countries. It’s possible to go from Finland to France to Italy to Greece without hitting a doganejo (customs checkpoint): I did the Finland to France thing in 2000. (I woke up in the middle of the night on a train, turned my phone on to check the time, got a text message: ‘Welcome to Belgium’. It was the only way I knew we’d even entered Belgium. )
Not that the UK and Ireland are NOT in the Schengen zone; you still have to go through customs between France and England.
Of course if you would have gone to Turin you would have had to stay there locked up in the Cathedral, but at least you still wouldn’t have had to show your passport.
Presumably, the phone registered on the Belgian network (I was in Germany before), they checked the IMEI, and since it was one that they’d never seen before, they sent a welcome message. Or maybe it was even easier: anytime something from outside was handed off to them, or activated on their network, it got a welcome message. The default language of the phone would tell them what language to use.
It’s standard procedure in Europe (and in a lot of other places). Typically you get a message from your home network’s partner in the country you have just arrived in, detailing rates and the local voicemail number you can use to avoid international rates, etc. It can be annoying when you keep switching between new networks and get “welcome” messages from three or four different companies - especially if you are near the international border.
But the answers were supererogatorily informative, so thanks!
-FrL-
(I was thinking, “Don’t they have to know your phone number to do that?” Problem was I hadn’t thought through as to what the antecedent of “they” could be in that sentence.)
They used to do this every, flipping time I entered Ontario. And when I was with my wife, it hit both of our phones. And since we don’t carry a text plan, we were charged 10¢ a pop for receiving the message every, single time. For some reason, it only affects my personal (AT&T phone), and not my work (Sprint) phone.
It wasn’t a stupid question. I wondered exactly the same thing when I read the “welcome to Belgium” thing, and would have asked exactly the same question you did, following exactly the same reasonning.
Ok, then, explain this: My very first trip to Europe was to Italy, back in 1994. I never went through customs on my arrival, in Rome, or on my departure, from Milan. Nobody even asked for my passport. And both flights were directly from/to JFK. According to my passport, I wasn’t there.
Could this have anything to do with the fact that it was an “independent tour”? (I was a newbie traveler and needed a sense of security.) The tour company shuttled us back and forth in each city, but still, nobody ever looked at my passport.
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