Originally Posted by
hqtrang
The main question is: do they check your visa when you travel (by plane) within the Schengen zone? And the background info of my situation is below:
I'm a non-EU citizen and currently I live in Spain on student visa. Recently I lost my passport which has my Spanish visa in it. I've applied for a new passport, but I cannot get a new Spanish visa unless I go back to NYC and have the consulate there stamp the visa on my new passport. However, the consulate said they would send me this paper that verifies that I'm living legally in Spain. The problem is I have plans to travel to Belgium, Italy and Greece soon and I'm worried that without a visa, I might not be able to either enter those countries or come back to Spain. I know there's no passport control when you get off the plane, but I remember last time I flew from Lisbon to Paris, the check-in guy looked for my visa in the passport. So I don't know if the rules require visa checking before boarding the plan and if I will get in trouble if I only have the my passport and the paper from the consulate and not an official visa.
PS: just to make it clear, I am not a citizen of a country that can enter the Schengen zone without a visa, even for less than 90 days.
I have by now had well over a thousand intra-Schengen flights on my US passports, and the odds of my US passports being checked for a visa on intra-Schengen flights is very slim overall even as I no longer have any Schengen visas in any of my passports. The rare exceptions have mostly been on arrival from flights from AMS or a "random" "customs" check when having carry-on luggage only and in the company of persons who appear to be of ethnicities that may be a majority in some countries in Asia or Africa -- these "random" flags usually correlating with the prevalence of racists in the police forces of those EU Schengen countries into which I am arriving.
Originally Posted by
Scrooge McDuck
Travel within Schengen is generally free of passport controls. The point is the "generally" which implies that each country has the right to perform passport controls for specific reasons, such as a big sports event (e.g. Olympic games), or e.g. a meeting of the G20. But you can easily avoid these events.
The other - and for you more risky - situation is that you can run any time into a police check, e.g. on the street when they look for drunken drivers or drivers without a valid driving license. Here, your missing passport stamp might be an issue. I assume that you know Murphy's Law: You will have exactly one random check in your whole life - and that one will happen exactly at that time when your passport has not yet the visa "moved"
.
Hasn't yet given me a major problem.
Entering the Schengen zone from outside is a totally different subject.
But entering the Schengen area e.g. from the UK it is possible that nobody looks at you. Mainly due to the fact that upon check-in in the UK your documents will be checked anyway.
For the intra Schengen flight there´s - as already mentionned - no requirement to check ID besides verification of the passenger matching the name in the reservation.
Even for entering the Schengen zone from the US, Canada and even some parts of Asia, my (US) passport was not checked by passport control in the EU on a substantial chunk of my non-EU-EU Schengen zone travels. That is less frequent than used to be the case, but it still happens to me.
For EU UK/IRL CTA to EU Schengen Zone travel, the airlines frequently check for entry requirements .... at least when dealing with non-OECD country passports.