But that's where none of us knows either. We were not in the back office at the time to hear that conversation. I think you can be sure such a procedure exists. I think collectively we do believe that with the paperwork you have with you (perhaps scanned/faxed through) the Border Agency would issue you and BA with a reference number and BA would let you board the flight. Something's either gone wrong there or the Border Agency has for some reason denied you entry. I sense it will be hard to know exactly what happened there even after you're back in the UK.

It's your choice but personally I would focus on solving the issue and worry about this later.

Yeah don't worry, I haven't just been sitting and monitoring FT. Wife managed to get my passport from embassy in London which is on its way here tomorrow so going home soon. YAY!!!

Excellent - I am sure you look forward to being back tomorrow.

I don't get the point why we are discussing so much about it.
OP is not a UK citizen. He retrieves his rights to enter the UK from EU treaty rights.
There is a rule that you must have a valid ID card to enter the UK.
But doesn't have it.

My beef would be more how the consulate (of the country the OP is holding citizenship with) was dealing with that matter.
Who brings his birth certificate along on travel? There should be another way to issue the OP a proper emergency passport.

[QUOTE=fomc;30465763]
There is ZERO chance the UK immigration authorities won’t allow me in. Hence, no risk to BA of a fine. [/QUOTE]

Sorry, but if this is your starting assumption, it is a badly mistaken one, and it very much ignores the current 'mood'. I have heard of a number of cases recently that I really would not have expected. In turn, starting from that mistaken assumption makes you very unlikely to reach a solution with the airline.

The position of Hungarian emigration in terms of letting you out on an expired document also has no bearing whatsoever on what UK authorities would do. Here, the correct procedure is indeed for BA to contact UK immigration and ask for clearance, if this is not confirmed, you will need either for your home country Consulate to be more understanding and give you a laissez passer or for someone to come to bring you your passport (in theories courier companies generally do not allow for them to be mailed). You can also contact UK immigration directly and if you get some formal confirmation from them they would let you in you can certainly show that to BA or another airline.

I do agree that this is all a massive pain in the back, but you are barking at the wrong tree. It is absolutely not BA's responsibility towards you to check the validity of your credentials though it is their agreed responsibility to immigration authorities, and I any case, letting you fly without the required paperwork would not be the right recourse.

Yeah it's also a royal PITA when they make an incorrect decision. There is no recourse. It is, rightly, not BA's fault as they are just following guidance. Happened to us once.

PITA indeed. Anyway, I'm sorted now...don't care anymore. just want to get home.

Yes, I suspect that this is precisely what happened. the BA agent might have communicated just some of the facts or they did and the BF agent did not hear correctly. It seems to me that, with the kind of documentation he had, I would have thought that the OP would have been a rather easy case to wave as good to travel.

Can you be a bit more specific as to the profile of the situations you have in mind? I too would have thought that the odds of the OP being denied entry with the kind of documentation he apparently had seems to me rather low.

I had a period a few years ago that I arrived quite a few times at the UK border without my "main" passport used for the UK. I was pedantic in being super truthful with the IOs (and not just slip in as a tourist on my other passport. Which got me to the border, via airlines in the first place). Every time was put in a holding pen (not as scary as it sounds, it's right there among the lines of people). They would then go to the back office, check up my story and 15-30 mins later, let in without any issue.

Getting to Eurostar station (or the ferry ports) would definitely solve the OPs predicament. He would be able to see an IO.


(the UK has an amazing visa system for entrepreneurs, great concept to attract immigrants that bring high value. Unfortunately thoroughly abused. A kebab shop owner hiring his "cousins" for min wage for the minimum required time is in same boat as tech entrepreneur, with dozens of employees, a product that can make bring real value to the world and made in UK, 10s of millions of foreign investment attracted, where every salary is many multiples of the min wage and all are in for the long run. So instead of solving the specific (yet rampant) abuse they just apply crazy bureaucracy to all and take a year for every decision along the immigration path. Kebab owner cares not she/he cannot travel. Tech entrepreneur might as well close the company down.)

sad I know

OK. Not to worry if you don't have the time.

Since OP has figured a solution, this is just a hypothetical idea, but I am curious what people think. Why not buy a BA ticket to home country (many suggest BA would let him board no problem). But this would entail a connection in LHR, where OP could just walk to immigration and plead his case. If it doesn't work he could just continue to home country if the connection is long enough. Would this work?

He would need an authority to travel from his home country, that would allow the connecting route, before BA would allow him to board

Whether UK would allow a transit without documentation would need to be checked I believe

I am also not sure why this thread did not stop after the suggestions for the OP to contact his home Consulate or have his documents couriered to him. All these side discussions about the freedom of movement and case law are simply out of place here. Any airline's agent would not be versed in all these intricacies and would simply follow the official guidelines of the government of the destination country. It is not airlines' fault that different member states publish different entry rules depending upon one's nationality - some countries accept expired IDs, while some - don't. That it may be illegal does not concern check-in or gate agents. That an EU citizen should be allowed to prove that they actually are one applies to Member States, not airlines. If the Member States have not caught up and have not updated their guidelines for airlines 'to accept for travel anyone who claims to be an EU citizen for them to make their case at the border,' there is really nothing to discuss on an airline's forum. Suggesting that BA somehow denied the OP entry into the UK is beyond stretching it. BA does not deny entry by refusing carriage any more than BA allows entry by carrying anyone to a country. The OP was not going to travel on BA with the documents on hand, as was confirmed by the exchange between BA and UK immigration authorities. Discussing how the OP's rights were abridged by the UK was not going to help and was not going to convince the airline to carry him.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by fatlasercat (Post 30470151)

Since OP has figured a solution, this is just a hypothetical idea, but I am curious what people think. Why not buy a BA ticket to home country (many suggest BA would let him board no problem). But this would entail a connection in LHR, where OP could just walk to immigration and plead his case. If it doesn't work he could just continue to home country if the connection is long enough. Would this work?

---

In theory, that should work as the airline would check the documents for the destination country rather that the UK (since the OP is clearly not a DATV national). But that would also depend upon the destination country - some specifically allow their citizens to arrive with expired documents, while some require a temporary doc/authorization. You'd be surprised but many people in other situations do just that.

Nor do they have any relevance here. (That being said, they do require that individuals have valid documents on them. They also require for an individual without valid documents not to be turned away immediately, but no guarantees of entry are given to an individual without valid documents).

We will never know what relevance there is here, since we don't know whether BA did actually contact immigration on the OP's behalf or whether they just made something up in the hope the OP would go away and sort it himself. As you know there have been plenty of examples of the latter over the years.

Whether or not BA contacted immigration authorities is of little relevance here as well. Guidelines published by the UK Government for airlines are pretty clear as to who should be accepted for travel. Contacting immigration is not one of the requirements. many airlines simply would not. That these guidelines may go contrary to the Directives is not a discussion for this forum. It simply won't help anyone because airline agents will continue to rely upon what's written on their screens rather than someone's interpretation of the EU law. It is up to the individual member states to implement these directives and give airlines clear instructions as to who should be allowed to be carried to the border. Engaging in such a discussion with airline agents would be a waste of time. They are simply doing their jobs. Debating governmental policy should be reserved for a different forum.

I'm not suggesting it is BA's job. However with reference to the OP (which we are discussing) I am questioning if BA's comment that UK Border were contacted and refusing to give a 'code' was a truthful statement.

If it was a true statement then they were obviously happy to contact UK Border and clearly there was a purpose in engaging in discussion.

On the othed hand if as you say it is not the airline's job then it would have surely been easier just to say so rather than indulge in some game of subterfuge.

I don't see why we should not believe that BA did contact the UKBA, especially since several posters confirmed that such codes exist.

Just a little point on UK airlines checking documentation when boarding flights... It is almost always firstly to make sure the person whose name is on the ticket is the person trying to board the flight then to make sure the airline doesn't get fined for passengers denied entry. Its all about revenue protection.

Actually, I disagree with that. The OP has a case as to why the documentations he had should be considered valid and sufficient to allow entry, and I would certainly expect BA to use the facility they have to contact the relevant authorities to put the case to them rather than deny boarding because they 'think' it would not be enough. However, I agree with your subsequent post that I find the op's apparent certainty that they did not do so unconvincing. I find it more likely that they did but may not have asked the best question, and I don't think the op's strategy seemed best here as from the op, he seemed to dismiss their worry off hand rather than help them frame the case.

Reminds me when I went to the wrong football game, but somehow the ticket taker let me in by mistake. I get to my seat and someone else showed up. I was asked to leave.

Not the ticket takers fault, but my own.

When I used to travel frequently, I had 2 UK passports.
It was still possible to end up in one country with one passport, whilst the other was somewhere else getting a visa.
The answer then, and now, is that is exactly what couriers do remarkably well. DHL was founded to send documents around the world, (for the shipping trade), and it excels at it still.

All the fine theory in this thread was not going to work. Only couriers could fix the issue.

Only yourself to blame
 

Andriyko [Yesterday, 5:10 am], succinctly put and exactly to the point. I fully understand OP's frustration but the only one with blame is himself. None of the BA agents or anyone else connected to this story sought to fly without the required documents, aka proof of freedom of movement. OP's expired national ID may have been revoked for some reason.

Neither BA nor the OP have done anything illegal or unlawful.

As I put in slightly different words, that was my thought a bit upthread as well, but as another pointed out, it's possible the document(s) in his possession were acceptable for his destination (Hungary) but not for return to the UK. This is something I think even the best eyes at London wouldn't have necessarily captured on the outbound, as that's not what they're looking for then. And things then got really complicated from there... and though it's correct to say that the OP is basically the responsible party for what happened, I do think it insensitive to suggest that a mistake like this wouldn't be something that he'd be hoping anyone and everyone with possible authority, leniency or influence on the matter would consider helping him out of.

But anyway, it got sorted. With enough inconvenience that I doubt the OP will be making the same error again unless he completely loses his memory.

One thing I do agree with OP and disagree with others is that Yes, it Does matter who BA actually talked with, and what that conversation was like, because that was the moment where this could either have been sorted with a few secure electronic communications, or instead now have taken several days out of the OP and his wife's life to sort it on their own. So I'd like to imagine one would make their best effort indeed to help (I know I would), but we won't know just what happened, or what didn't.



I will edit to add that, although a totally different scenario from the OP's I still remember how grateful I am for what BA ground staff did to help me out of a predicament of my own making a few years ago. My passport had fallen (unknown to me until I looked for it) down - very far down - into one of the spaces you don't see too easily in 1K of the 747. I was on a transit from longhaul (so obviously had my passport when I checked in) to shorthaul europe. Trembling at the flight connection center to explain that I was missing both my onward boarding card and my passport, they calmed me down, explained that I could go through security to the CCR without ID (they just had to reprint my boarding card) and they would send someone onto the aircraft to look for my passport during my rather long connection. This attitude of "we are here to help - don't worry" even when it wasn't clear what the outcome would be is what I remember, and what I wonder (somewhat doubt) to have been present in an admittedly different but similarly unsettling situation of suddenly finding yourself stuck without the documents you either had or thought you had. And awhile later, after I was showered and relaxed, someone in a bright yellow vest appeared in the CCR very proud that he had my passport, because "it was really far down in the seat and hard to get to" but he had done it.

Not for me to defend BA but this is of course 100% nonsense.

There are no exit controls from UK and OP was admitted to Hungary by local immigration. No rules were broken nor was there anything illegal.

How about leaving on an entirely different airline? The problem is obviously with the ground crew of BA in Budapest. Also with all the fret over Brexit it's obvious that the British don't want foreigners living in their country that's why they want to leave the European Union. I guarantee you if you were an Englishman or from Scotland or one of the other parts of Britain you would have long gone home without much ado. They are just busting your chops.