Originally Posted by
kyanar
For a start, as you recall the gate agent will scan your passport through the reader before letting you on the plane - it will appear with either a green light which you no doubt recognise and an "OK TO BOARD" response, or a red light and "DO NOT BOARD". This is checked - in real time - with the border agency of the country you are travelling to. If you do not have an API record for the plane, this will usually result in "DO NOT BOARD" and the agent must request a "Governmental Override" from the border agency.
Is this one of those things that is *supposed* to happen but might not happen outside the US? Just leaving the UK a few days ago, which has no exit immigration anyway as I understand it, the first time my physical passport was needed was just before entering the plane, and that just involved its being looked at for a few seconds, not waved over any scanner. I was too tired to recall what happened boarding the return plane, though Spain has exit immigration and I certainly had to scan it myself there.
there is actually a working group proposing multiple passports in an API record to solve just such a problem.
Ooh, I suppose this might be a problem here when the EU's ETIAS and the UK's ETA are introduced...
For this week's travel, I gave my Spanish details to both airlines, and used my Spanish passport for API and to wave at the gate at both ends, as well as for Spanish entrance and exit immigration. The only place I used my British passport was for British (entrance) immigration.
Since as I understand it the British authorities want the API data for flights with origin in the UK as well as destination, I suppose they now have an API exit record somewhere of a Spaniard who they never knew existed in the UK (as I gained my Spanish nationality at the consulate), followed by an API entrance record of that same Spaniard a few days later that can't be matched with an immigration record because I used my British passport at immigration. If their sytem is sufficiently smart then I suppose they'll do a fuzzy partial name match (not exactly the same first names *or* surname since Spain has strict name rules) as place / date of birth / gender all correspond precisely. (When I renew my British passport, I am supposed to declare my foreign passports, but there seems to be no process / obligation to do so beforehand. And Spain doesn't seem to care from a passport issuance PoV what foreign IDs/nationalities/names I have.)
But after ETIAS/ETA, if I were to do the same thing, travelling back to the UK the airline would presumably expect to see my Electronic Travel Authorisation as a non-British person if I present them my Spanish passport, since there was no way to enter another passport's details. So, I'd have to do as you say: present my Spanish passport at exit immigration, but present my British passport to the airline. Maybe Spanish exit immigration isn't as fussy as American exit immigration - I have come to learn that Spain has a very different values when it comes to the benefits of migration than the UK, which itself seems to lockstep with the US - but I don't *know*.
I'm learning!