Passport expiration and Schengen rules
 

Planning road trip starting in Italy and going into Switzerland (maybe France via Geneva). Flying in and out of Venice. My US passport will expire 92 days after my departure home from Venice. Should I anticipate any problems or does this just narrowly conform to all the rules?

Why not renew your passport before the trip?

That's an option, though I would probably need to decide that now since I've heard of long delays (at least earlier in the pandemic). Trip isn't until August.

Provided your passport meets the following criteria you're good to go-

• Your passport Date of Issue must be less than 10 years before the date of entry into the Schengen Area
• Your passport must have 3 months validity remaining on the day you leave the Schengen Area

Those long delays are in the past now. Many recent (non-expedited) renewals for US passports are being delivered in ~2 weeks, and the published time on the website is <2 months. Strongly recommend just renewing the passport in a few months from now and not worry about it.

there is a “passport wait time” thread on the USA destination board.

It’s not really fare to use what happened nearly 4 years ago as being the current situation.

The long delays were as recent as summer 2023.

I refer you to post 5.

And also the thread on the US destination board where people are reporting quick turnarounds,

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/usa/...reads-179.html


Bur I don’t know why Americans put up with such shoddy service. In the UK the main delays are caused by the postal service getting your old passport to HMPO and not in producing the passport. The next biggest cause of delay is down to people not submitting the required documents in a timely manner.

I regularly monitor that thread. I'm well aware that passport processing processing times are back to normal.

You wrote that: "It’s not really fare to use what happened nearly 4 years ago as being the current situation." I simply pointed out that there were long delays as recently as this past summer. My "expedited" renewal with express mailing in July, 2023, took a month. People who did not pay for expedited processing experienced processing times as long as 12-13 weeks. It's now down to under two weeks for expedited renewals and as little as three weeks for regular renewals.

So is it correct that you need at least three months of validity on a passport to enter the Schengen area as non-Schengen passport holder (i.e., a USA issued passport). Some U.S. State Department websites say six months. So there is a conflict.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizen...s/index_en.htm

versus

https://travel.state.gov/content/tra...ngen_Area.html

EU requirement is validity of three months after your intended leaving date. If you can't prove that date to the immigration officer, they take maximum permitted stay = 90 days, and add the three months to that. Which is where the "6 months" is coming from.