Heathrow Airport: Family’s £8k holiday to Greece goes down the drain after airport scanner tears passport

A family of four were forced to abandon their £8,000 holiday after a scanner at a UK airport ripped the mother’s passport. Emily Allen, alongside her husband and two children, were all set to go on their all-inclusive trip to the Greek island of Corfu before the incident occurred. While her passport was being scanned at Heathrow Airport it was damaged by the machine. It then rendered her document invalid.

She told the Telegraph that she had “initially” placed her passport “into the machine the wrong way around, so slid it back out carefully and turned it around”. She added: “During this process the photo/observations page, which on my 2016 document is not laminated – just paper covered by a thin film patch – ripped, leaving an inch-long tear across the edge of the passport photo.”

Ms Allen said she was originally advised by staff at Heathrow to buy some tape from an airport shop to patch it up. However it turned out this was not sufficient enough repair.

The family would have been able to fly out of the UK, but there was no guarantee that the Greek authorities would accept the document when they landed. They said they had to make the “painful decision” to “simply cancel and go home.”

The family cancelled the holiday despite a lot of the elements of the trip being non-refundable. The Allens lost out on just under £4,000, and they weren’t able to recoup any of the costs through their travel insurance despite putting in a claim.

A damaged passport can cause passengers to miss out on their holidays as they can be denied boarding to a flight or entry to a country.

According to HM Passport Office, a damaged passport is one which isn’t in a fit condition to be accepted as proof of identity. Damage can include:

• Indecipherable details
• The laminate has lifted enough to allow the possibility of photo substitution
• Discolouration to the bio-data page
• Chemical or ink spillage on any page
• Missing or detached pages
• The chip or antenna shows through the end paper on the back cover for the new style e-passports
• The chip has been identified as damaged after investigation

Airlines err on the side of caution as they can be fined an average of £2,780 per passenger if they have allowed someone to fly with damaged or inadequate documentation.

Airlines typically say: “We may decide to refuse to carry you or your baggage if the following has happened or we reasonably believe may happen ... you have not, or do not appear to have, valid travel documents.”

The family’s incident at Heathrow comes after a man described the airport as an “absolute mess” as he waited an hour to get through e-gates due to queues which were “flowing out of the room”. Alex Wiseman said that Terminal 4 at the airport on Sunday evening (1 October) was “just chaos”.

He shared a photo of the huge queues at around 8:45pm on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. He explained to NationalWorld that staff were “running round shouting at people” and that when he got through to the baggage hall there were “bags everywhere”. He added that two members of staff were just “flinging them off the belts”.