On June 6, an Australian tourist traveling to a friend’s wedding experienced a travel nightmare: He was denied entry to Indonesia due to an unforeseen passport issue. The problem was not one of visa status or expiration date; rather, Matt Vandenberg was sent back from whence he came because of a small tear on one page of his passport.
Vandenberg took to Twitter to share his experience, which started in Sydney where his passport was scanned without incident. A six-hour Jetstar flight to Denpasar, a common destination airport for travelers heading to Bali, followed with no trouble to report. When it came time to receive his passport stamp and enter Indonesia, however, an official spotted an approximately 1-centimeter rip (“I had no idea until he bent it all the way back, and it stood out,” Vandenberg said) and told him that he would not be allowed to enter the country. His passport was then confiscated until he could return to Australia 12 hours later.
Despite the many bells and whistles present on modern passports worldwide, passports are still made of paper and, as such, are susceptible to damage. A damaged passport, depending on the circumstances, can be as detrimental to your travel plans as an expired one. If the wrong immigration official spots the wrong thing, as in Vandenberg’s case, your trip may be toast. The rules—namely, what constitutes significant damage—vary from country to country, which accounts for the difference in Vandenberg’s treatment in Australia versus Indonesia (home to some of the strictest passport damage laws in the world). The only solution, really, is to replace the passport, and there’s no special treatment, either. No matter what freak accident you may encounter, expect to get in line with everybody else.
The US State Department notes damage that will require a replacement as “water damage, a significant tear, unofficial markings on the data page, missing visa pages (torn out), a hole punch, or other injuries,” while also flagging that “wear and tear” such as bending and fanning are not to be worried about. But the subjectivity of those rules (what qualifies as a “significant tear”?) may be difficult to parse. To get a better grasp on passport damage, and what to do about it, we turned to an expert.
How can a passport sustain damage?
Ilya Buravstov of Generations Visa Service has seen it all when it comes to passport damage. The risk of damage begins just after a passport’s creation–while in transit to its owner: Buravstov has seen cases of packages falling off the truck and getting trampled in traffic. Damage may be invisible–excessive exposure to sunlight could fry that chip embedded in the cover, making it un-scannable in a foreign destination.
Most common is water damage—new passports getting left out in the rain in flimsy envelopes, liquid spills, passports supposedly safely stored away ruined by storm floods, the list goes on. The State Department allows for bending sustained by a passport being kept in a back pocket, but if those pants still harbor the document when they go through the laundry, your luck’s washed out.