Himeno

Several times now when I've checked in for international flights at the airport, the check in agent has had to have visa requirements explained to them.
I remember these incidents most clearly:
In 2008 I was in DEN checking in with F9 for a flight to YVR. The agent flipped through my Australian passport looking for a Canadian visa. When she didn't find one, she asked about it. I explained that Australian's did not need a visa to visit Canada (it also says this in Timatic, though I didn't know it at the time). It was only after she disappeared into a back room with my passport and made some calls that my boarding pass was issued.

In late September, I was checking in with JL for ICN-NRT-DFW-ANC. The agent absolutely refused to check me in as I didn't have a US visa and was traveling under the VWP with a confirmed ESTA. He claimed that as my passport was not an e-passport, I was not eligible for the VWP. However, the VWP has an exemption for the requirement of an e-passport if the passport was issued before 25 October 2005 (it merely needs to be machine readable - like my passport issued 11 Feb 05 is). This exemption is listed on the state department website and in Timatic. It was only when I showed him the US entry stamp from 4 months before that he backed down and issued the passes. While I can understand an agent for an airline with no direct US flights from that airport to not know all the rules (even though he could just look it up on the computer), I don't understand having to get into the same argument with the agents at the AA lounge in NRT when they changed the NRT-DFW-ANC JL passes to AA ones.

How often does this sort of thing happen?

catocony

It's a by-product of airlines cutting back a lot of counter personnel - especially in the US. No counter agent is going to know visa requirements from each country to each country, but they should know how to check in the system. When they don't, it's a mixture of laziness and "I know what I'm doing" mentality, which usually strikes when they don't know what they're doing.

gnarly

The thing about visa criteria is that they change. I would hope that the counter agents would check more often than not. It is quite possible for there to be different regulations from one week to the next. The important thing is that you, as a traveller, have done your research and have met the criteria to the best of your abilities.
Of course print-outs from various governments' web sites on their current rules can help.

peachfront

No idea how often it happens but it happens often enough to be scary that you have to debate it with someone. I have heard that travelers on AA have been denied transport from USA to Bolivia, even though in theory an American can buy their visa on arrival at the airport in Santa Cruz and I saw a (not very busy) booth there at VVI for people to do so. I think most people, having heard the scare stories, go ahead and spend the extra money and hassle to buy the visa in advance. The first time I traveled to Bolivia, the nice lady assisting me was baffled that the buzzer went off, because she thought Santa Cruz was in California. Sigh. I found the visa page in my passport for her...

I won't say that Delta is just as bad, but once a lady asked me to show a visa for Turkey -- there is no visa required, you just buy a $20 stamp at the airport in Istanbul -- and after her boss told her to let it go, then she still wanted to know where Amsterdam (my connection) was. Even if it was (as I must assume) her very first day on the job, she really should have known already where AMS is. It isn't fair to the agent or to the traveler to push someone out there with no training at all.

I don't believe these people have the last word to deny you boarding. If you have a real problem brewing, as with the clueless never-hearda AMS/IST lady, then you just have to wait for a supervisor to show up. I think I waited 10 minutes and maybe less. If the supervisor had been equally clueless, which seems impossible, my next move would have been to call the Gold Elite line and ask where to go from there, but it didn't come to that.

Jupiter's Ally

While I might let a check-in agent or gate agent a pass on visa rules... here's one that still baffles me.

EK check-in at JFK a couple of years ago. I was traveling to Mumbai, India and presented an Indian passport. Agent flipped through all pages and then said, "Sir, I can't seem to find a visa for India in this passport"


In hindsight - I find it amusing