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Self inflicted bad experience


easy1969
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Aside from having all of our documents together by at least the night before; I also double check having our passports in our bag at least 3 times between the house and the airport. Very paranoid about getting to the airport/ship without documents.

 

 

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This is my biggest nightmare after reading about it a few times on here. I will be checking, checking, and re-checking that all passports, BC, ID, etc are in our possession before we leave home and before leaving the hotel on the way down to NOLA and then again when leaving the NOLA hotel before embarkation.

 

We did not get passports for our boys as I didn't see a need and didn't want to spend so much on something that will only last 5 years. I already have their birth certificates in the folder with all cruise documents. One of my son's BC, he was born in 2003, is different from my daughter's and my youngest son's. His BC only has his name, sex, date of birth, county of birth, birth name of mother, and birth name of father on it. The other two have a really detailed BC with all the boxes of ALL info from birth. Is my son's with minimal info on it going to be good enough to board or should I go in and get a copy of it that matches the other two kids'?

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This is my biggest nightmare after reading about it a few times on here. I will be checking, checking, and re-checking that all passports, BC, ID, etc are in our possession before we leave home and before leaving the hotel on the way down to NOLA and then again when leaving the NOLA hotel before embarkation.

 

We did not get passports for our boys as I didn't see a need and didn't want to spend so much on something that will only last 5 years. I already have their birth certificates in the folder with all cruise documents. One of my son's BC, he was born in 2003, is different from my daughter's and my youngest son's. His BC only has his name, sex, date of birth, county of birth, birth name of mother, and birth name of father on it. The other two have a really detailed BC with all the boxes of ALL info from birth. Is my son's with minimal info on it going to be good enough to board or should I go in and get a copy of it that matches the other two kids'?

 

As long as it was issued by a government entity (city, county, state, etc.) then your son's BC will work even with the minimal information. If it was issued by the hospital then it will not work. You could always obtain another one from the state if you have time. (FWIW our middle son's birth certificate also did not look like everyone else's, it was on plain white paper and had been folded many times so it looked rather ratty. It was however issued by the town where he was born and did have a seal.)

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  • 11 months later...

Question on documentation: Is a passport a requirement? We are traveling in/out of Fort Lauderdale, heading to a few islands, one that is not a US territory, but I did see some fine print that a DL and a certified/original birth certificate would suffice. Both kiddos' passports expired last year and I have a name change on mine. Do we need update passports?

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Question on documentation: Is a passport a requirement? We are traveling in/out of Fort Lauderdale, heading to a few islands, one that is not a US territory, but I did see some fine print that a DL and a certified/original birth certificate would suffice. Both kiddos' passports expired last year and I have a name change on mine. Do we need update passports?

 

As long as you are a US citizen and your cruise leaves and returns to the same port.....then what you have, a certified birth certificate and DL will work.

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Question on documentation: Is a passport a requirement? We are traveling in/out of Fort Lauderdale, heading to a few islands, one that is not a US territory, but I did see some fine print that a DL and a certified/original birth certificate would suffice. Both kiddos' passports expired last year and I have a name change on mine. Do we need update passports?

 

As long as you are all US citizens (and no one was born in Puerto Rico) and your cruise line doesn't require anything more then birth certificates then you should be fine (if they are 16 or older they would need government issued ID of course). Your name change would need to be substantiated with a bridging document. Whether or not it's advisable for you to renew depends on how much risk there is of you having to come back early and your acceptance of that risk.

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I have been on many cruises and have enjoyed each and every one of them.

What I am about to share is the story of one of my close friends and his wife's first cruise.

 

As a regular cruiser I talk about cruising to anyone who is interested I talk about the great times we have had cruising and what a good value I believe it is.

So my friend decides that he wants to book a cruise for him and wife and I give him the name and number of my carnival vacation planner.

he proceeded and booked a 7 day out of Tampa.

He and his wife were so excited about this cruise and counted the days til cruise time.

so the time arrived. My friend and his wife left from Knoxville tn and drove to the port in tampa, parked and proceeded to board the ship , this is when the problem became apparent. My friends wife was good to go all documentation correct, but my friend had forgot his passport back in tn.

to make it even worse his wife had asked him when they were packing if he remembered his passport and he said he remembered it..... he really had not and planed to get it out of the safe but.... being so excited about the cruise and preparing to be out of town for 10 days he forgot to get the passport.

he did not think of it again till they were preparing to board the ship.

 

At the end of the day they were not allowed to board and lost all of the cruise fare.

My friend has told me some of the details of that long drive back to Tennessee with his very unhappy wife and it was as you may imagine it was a tense trip.

 

I felt terrible for them as it would suck to be at the port and watch your vacation leave without you.

 

well anyway the point of this post is to remind everyone that this type of thing happens often, and you don't want it to be you. SO TRIPLE CHECK TO BE SURE YOU AND EVERYONE IN YOUR PARTY HAVE ALL TRAVAL DOCUMENTS.

 

As I stated above I felt bad about them missing the cruise and thanks to a very good casino offer my wife and I were able to treat them to a cruise a few months later( this cruise came with a few jokes about passports..)

we all had a great time.

 

'I wished we had packed the TV'

'Why'

'My passport's on top of it ...' :)

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As long as you are a US citizen and your cruise leaves and returns to the same port.....then what you have, a certified birth certificate and DL will work.

 

 

 

Not necessarily. Some cruise lines require that all passengers on all itineraries produce a passport at embarkation (and often require surrendering them to the purser before boarding.

 

 

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Aside from having all of our documents together by at least the night before; I also double check having our passports in our bag at least 3 times between the house and the airport. Very paranoid about getting to the airport/ship without documents.

 

 

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I am very OCD about my passport. Can't help myself. Glad to see someone else shares my compulsion.

 

Roz

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Not necessarily. Some cruise lines require that all passengers on all itineraries produce a passport at embarkation (and often require surrendering them to the purser before boarding.

 

 

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Do tell...which cruise lines? Are they leaving and returning to a US port? The only time this happened to me was on a recent river cruise in Eastern Europe where one of the countries wasn't part of the Euro Zone.

 

Roz

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I am very OCD about my passport. Can't help myself. Glad to see someone else shares my compulsion.

 

Roz

 

Me too! And after the 3rd check in our apartment, one final check when getting into the car (after that, it's too late!). This coincides with the final check on wallets, currency/ies and debit & credit cards and driving licence at which stage I conclude with the immortal words, 'If we've forgotten anything else, we'll just have to buy it ...'.

 

And then, as we drive to our embarkation port, we play the 'You know what we've forgotten, don't you ...' game. We often have to drive 450-500 miles to the cruise terminal, so we can garner quite an impressive list of forgotten items ... Less a holiday packing, more like a house move most of the time :*.

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Not necessarily. Some cruise lines require that all passengers on all itineraries produce a passport at embarkation (and often require surrendering them to the purser before boarding.

 

 

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I have never been requested as a US citizen to surrender my passport at boarding or anytime during the cruise when sailing closed loop in the US. The ONLY time we have been asked to surrender them was on a couple of cruises in the Med/Holy Lands and the port in common on those was Turkey. On the one cruise, we had them collected and returned to us twice. The ports were Alexandria, Egypt-Ashdod, Israel-Haifa, Israel-Kusadasi, Turkey-Piraeus, Greece-and Crete.

 

We haven’t traveled in the orient to know if they do that there, too. But NEVER on a US closed loop cruise.

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Do tell...which cruise lines? Are they leaving and returning to a US port? The only time this happened to me was on a recent river cruise in Eastern Europe where one of the countries wasn't part of the Euro Zone.

 

 

 

Roz

 

 

 

Pretty much every premium and luxury line: e.g., Azamara, Oceania, Regent, Crystal, etc. requires all passengers on all itineraries (including closed loop US ones) to produce a valid passport (good through X months -usually 6- following your return date).

 

 

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Producing a valid passport is different than surrendering your passport.

 

Roz

 

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Sorry -left out the original "USUALLY." And that sometimes includes the closed loops- just depends on the circumstances of the time. Most regular cruisers on these lines are used to handing them over. Safest and most convenient emergency retrieval is with the purser.

 

 

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Producing a valid passport is different than surrendering your passport.

 

Roz

 

Sent from my SM-S820L using Forums mobile app

 

 

 

Sorry -left out the original "OFTEN" surrender. And that sometimes includes the closed loops- just depends on the circumstances of the time. Most regular cruisers on these lines are used to handing them over. Safest, shortest and most convenient emergency retrieval is with the purser.

 

 

 

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Years ago I worked for an entrepreneur who decided to celebrate receiving a contract which had required him to spend many late nights at the office by taking his wife and children on a cruise. I was awoken early the Saturday morning they were scheduled to board with a desperate request that I go to the office, locate the children's birth certificates, and fax them to a number he gave me. And hurry if they finish boarding the ship before it gets here we're out of luck. I drove to the office with my hair every which way in my sleep sweats and got the documents to them in plenty of time.

 

I think of that memory whenever we travel. Since our first overseas trip I have a special handbag with a compartment just the right size for passports I carry. The bag has changed a couple of times but the requirement that it have a passport ready compartment remains the same.The night before the cruise I make sure our cash, credit cards, documentation or tickets for anything we have reserved, and passports are securely stored in that bag. Then I clip both our sets of car keys into it ensuring we cannot leave without collecting this bag. I wear it at all times until such time as I can safely store it in the safe in our cabin, and then I wear it all the way home from the time we leave our cabin on board until I lock it up in our safe.

 

Now I just need to figure out how to make sure I remember to renew my passport after our cruise in February. :rolleyes:

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A while ago our family of four was flying to Florida for a cruise. During a layover, my wife realized that the zipper of her purse that held that passports was wide open. Only three of the four passports were still there. . . We told the airline employees at the gate what had happened, then waited very nervously for about 20 minutes, talking about what we could do to get him on the ship (it was our oldest son's passport that was missing). To our elation, the cleaning crew found the passport on the floor of the flight we were just on and returned it to us. Needless to say, our passports now travel very securely. . .

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A while ago our family of four was flying to Florida for a cruise. During a layover, my wife realized that the zipper of her purse that held that passports was wide open. Only three of the four passports were still there. . . We told the airline employees at the gate what had happened, then waited very nervously for about 20 minutes, talking about what we could do to get him on the ship (it was our oldest son's passport that was missing). To our elation, the cleaning crew found the passport on the floor of the flight we were just on and returned it to us. Needless to say, our passports now travel very securely. . .

 

 

 

Thankfully, a good outcome.

Perhaps the worst place to carry anything of value is a purse (unless it's one of those Kevlar ones with a Kevlar cross body shoulder strap).

Regular purses, not unlike men's pants packets are a favorite target of those little kids in foreign ports whose fingers are bandaged (hiding those razor blades).

 

 

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Knock on wood, in all my years of travelling I have not left anything vitally important at home.

When I send my wife off somewhere I stick a big note on the inside of the door. PASSPORT- CREDIT CARD- INSURANCE CARD- MEDS...

 

In hotels , where I tend to put valuables in the safe, I put one shoe in the safe as well.

That's a trick I teach my flight attendant colleagues. It's just too easy to leave a passport or id card on the safe when pick up is a 3.30 am from some unfamiliar hotel....

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I'm so anal about everything in my life that I always know where my credit cards are (in my wallet, and ALWAYS in the same slots), and where our passports live when we aren't traveling. Those passports get put in an inner section of my purse, or in our carry on bag, when I pack for the trip.

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