The practicalities of the new UK Electronic Travel Authorisation

[IvanV]

There's an article in this week's Private Eye about how the new immigration rules don't work for dual nationals. By way of reminder, since it hasn't been very well publicised, as of 1 April 2025, if you are an EU national (also EEA and Switzerland) and want to come to the UK for a visit, you have to apply for an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA), which costs £16.

Now my daughter is a dual national, and made a brief trip to Czech last weekend. Previously she could easily do that with her Czech passport. She accidentally left her British passport in her student room at university, so proposed to travel with her Czech passport. It was a bit late to make such a long trip to go and fetch the passport, so I said, well just pay that £16 for an ETA to make sure you can get back into the country. But she failed to get one, at about the third question, which was "what country do you live in?" "UK" is not an answer you can even enter to that question. I also read from the Private Eye article that further down the list of questions is "what other nationalities do you have." British dual nationals cannot get an ETA, even if they live abroad. Of course you could lie and get one, as my daughter could also have done. But that's not usually a very good approach to immigration matters.

There were two points in my daughter's trip home that were potentially difficult. First was boarding the aircraft. The airline rep at the gate asked to see her ETA, as she was asking everyone else without a British passport. But she replied, (in perfect Czech which always helps when dealing with Czech authorities) that she didn't need one, as she is a British resident. The airline didn't ask for any proof of that. It may have helped that my wife went before her in the queue, and gave just the same answer. But my wife's situation is different - she has settled status. I don't think an airline can easily check that you have that, or even reasonably ask for a demonstration of that, as it is electronic and hasn't been designed for easy demonstration to airlines. So I think the airline in practice just has to believe you. Though that was Wizzair, and they aren't as unpleasant about such things as Ryanair, who have sometimes required more restrictive things than immigration, because they want it to be easy for themselves to be sure. I did in fact have a look on Ryanair's website to see what they think. They did not give an indication that you have to prove these things to them at the gate with documentation, probably because it is impractical. I think Ryanair won't like that at all, and will be lobbying to have something more determinative and straightforward that they can check and be sure. So I wonder how this will develop.

Second was arriving at the UK airport. Now I did some googling, and my information was that in the present early stages after implementation of this, a person in my daughter's situation might suffer delays at immigration while additional checks were made, but would probably be admitted. My daughter suggested she go to the e-gate and see if she got in, and I advised her to try to go through before my wife. I rather suspected that when my daughter put her passport on the e-gate at immigration, it would reject her on the grounds that she neither had an ETA nor settled status. But in fact it just let her through. So I think that at present, immigration e-gates are not set up to detect if you have an ETA. They may not even have been set up to detect settled status either, as they probably didn't need to before now. Probably they will now have to be, if this is to make any sense. But probably they will be rolled out across airports, and it won't happen on a single date. Maybe my daughter was lucky to be entering at Luton, which would not be such a priority as the larger airports for immigration to fix up the gates to detect all that.

The Private Eye article drew attention to the situation of dual nationals who live abroad, don't have a British passport, but aren't allowed an ETA. Children in particular may well not have a British passport in such a situation. My daughter didn't get a Czech passport until fairly recently, because why go to the expense and trouble of getting one. (Fortunately, in Czech, you get passports and ID cards at local town halls, so it is much less fuss than Britain.) So when this is enforced, they will have to get a British passport to enter Britain. Well in theory they don't, because you can alternatively get a certificate that you don't need an ETA. But it costs £600, which is a lot more expensive than a passport or an ETA. So that is a very silly provision, that practically no one would take up unless there were in some curious situation I haven't thought of.

I had a couple of sleepless nights about whether my daughter was going to be deported, or held until I could go on a long trip to fetch her passport. I made her show me where her university room keys are. She was even joking to her friends about whether she might fail to turn up for things, in case she might be deported. But it turned out to be no worry, at least for now.

At the end of the day, this £16 ETA is largely performative. It seems to serve no useful purpose that couldn't be equally served by just letting these people in and recording their entry. The only additional information they get from it is from asking the question, what address can you be contacted at while in the UK? But this is a silly question often asked by immigration in many countries, because many visitors do not have any such reliable contact address, and are not required to stay at a single location while in the country. You just have to put in what you think you can get away with.

[Woodchopper]

Yes, my friend found that as well. He's a dual national with an expired UK passport who lives in a European country. He found that he was unable to fill in the form after he entered the information that he is a UK citizen.

There will also be lots of people who live abroad who are British citizens by descent but don't have a British passport.

[IvanV]

There will also be lots of people who live abroad who are British citizens by descent but don't have a British passport.

Well that's an interesting question, which the Shamima Begum case is relevant to. The reaction of many such people to the question "are you British" would be "no" or "not at the moment", but that might be a questionable answer. If you have the right to assert British residence and get a British passport, are you British before you do that?

According to the UK Supreme Court in the Shamima Begum case, perhaps you are British. They ruled that Shamima Begum is Bangladeshi by descent, and therefore of Bangladeshi nationality.

But according to the Bangladeshi authorities, she isn't Bangladeshi until she applies for Bangladeshi nationality, and they would have it refused it. I rather suspect that it if this case was the other way around, a person of British descent who hadn't yet applied for British residence and a passport, the British authorities would give the same answer that the Bangladeshi authorities gave.

And indeed that would be consistent with how the British authorities behaved in the case of people like Spike Milligan, and the Windrush people. Milligan applied to renew his British passport, and was refused on the grounds that under the new nationality act he as no longer British. Rather he would have to apply to be British, which people in his circumstances were entitled to be. But he wasn't British until he did that, and went through a procedure that required him to make an oath of loyalty to the British crown. And maybe these days even have take a test of English language and cultural knowledge - I don't know if that applies to people who might be British by descent.

A person may well be unaware that they are British by descent. Or unaware of whether they might be. Or not know if they would succeed in applying for it. I have quite a bit of Irish in my ancestry. Both my mother and my father have an Irish grandparent, and there's a bit more further back. My Dutch ancestors immigrated to Liverpool, so no surprise. I wasn't sure whether I could be Irish until I looked into it quite carefully, and it turns out that I can't be.

[Woodchopper]

There will also be lots of people who live abroad who are British citizens by descent but don't have a British passport.

Well that's an interesting question, which the Shamima Begum case is relevant to. The reaction of many such people to the question "are you British" would be "no" or "not at the moment", but that might be a questionable answer. If you have the right to assert British residence and get a British passport, are you British before you do that?

As far as I know British citizenship is passed automatically from the parent to the child the moment their child is born, so long as the parent was born in Britain.* Having a passport confirms that, but someone is still a citizen even if they don't have one.

*If the parent was born elsewhere it gets complicated.

[noggins]

I cannot fathom the Begum case: a person is a citizen of country X if X agree they are, end of argument.

[IvanV]

I cannot fathom the Begum case: a person is a citizen of country X if X agree they are, end of argument.

I remain astonished by that case. And also disappointed that the present government hasn't fixed it case by restoring her British citizenship. But they appear to want to look as "tough" on immigration as their predecessors. Their complaint about the prior government is that they were using silly ineffective methods, like the ridiculous Rwanda stuff, not that they were being unduly strict on it.

There will also be lots of people who live abroad who are British citizens by descent but don't have a British passport.

Well that's an interesting question, which the Shamima Begum case is relevant to. The reaction of many such people to the question "are you British" would be "no" or "not at the moment", but that might be a questionable answer. If you have the right to assert British residence and get a British passport, are you British before you do that?

As far as I know British citizenship is passed automatically from the parent to the child the moment their child is born, so long as the parent was born in Britain.* Having a passport confirms that, but someone is still a citizen even if they don't have one.

*If the parent was born elsewhere it gets complicated.

And that is exactly one of the cases where it is problematic.

And as the Shamima Begum case also shows, you can be refused British citizenship that is seemingly certain, even if you have only tenuous rights to another country's nationality, if they don't like you. So you can't really be certain if you have it until you apply for it.

[sTeamTraen]

There were two points in my daughter's trip home that were potentially difficult. First was boarding the aircraft. The airline rep at the gate asked to see her ETA, as she was asking everyone else without a British passport. But she replied, (in perfect Czech which always helps when dealing with Czech authorities) that she didn't need one, as she is a British resident. The airline didn't ask for any proof of that. It may have helped that my wife went before her in the queue, and gave just the same answer. But my wife's situation is different - she has settled status. I don't think an airline can easily check that you have that, or even reasonably ask for a demonstration of that, as it is electronic and hasn't been designed for easy demonstration to airlines. So I think the airline in practice just has to believe you.

There has been a similar issue since October 2021 (when it became necessary for EU citizens to have a passport to enter the UK) for the 1.5 million EU citizens who are resident in the UK but do not have a passport from their home country (because they arrived pre-Brexit, travelling on just their ID card). Too many checkin/gate agents have learned to repeat "Everyone. Must. Have. A. Full. Passport. To. Travel. To. The. UK." and are unaware that any exceptions exist.

I get a similar issue when I travel to the UK on my Irish Passport Card, which is a sort of halfway house between an ID card and a passport. It's great, I travel all over the EU on with no problem, but on at least two occasions going to the UK I would have been denied boarding (once by Ryanair, once by Easyjet) if I had not had my full passport with me. Showing the gov.uk page that explicitly mentions the card as acceptable for entering the UK did not help in either case. A couple of weeks ago I was nearly not let out of Spain by the outgoing passport control officers because "They won't let you into the UK with that", even though it's absolutely none of their business whether I get let in (at least the airlines can claim that they have to pay a fine if someone is refused entry).

Getting back to dual nationality, things are about to get even worse when ETIAS (the EU's own ETA) comes in, presumably in 2026 (although it has already slipped 3 or 4 times). Mrs sTeamTraen has a UK and a French passport. As mentioned in the OP she can't get a UK-ETA, so she has to go to the UK on her UK passport. Presumably similar restrictions (either "no other passport allowed" or "no EU residents can get one") will apply to ETIAS, so she will return to the EU on her French passport. This is no problem at the actual borders, but if you buy a return ticket on many airlines you only get to enter one passport number for the whole trip. So when the airlines start checking that you have either an ETA going the one way or an ETIAS going the other, she will fall foul of one or the other. Basically it's single tickets from now on. Fortunately the model of low-cost airlines means that you don't save by buying a return, but back in the days of PEX and APEX fares this would have been a huge disadvantage.

I have UK and Irish passports, which in theory is the best of all worlds because the Irish one is an EU passport (no ETIAS needed) and also gets you into the UK without an ETA because of the Common Travel Area. But I have already heard of one Irish person living in Spain being wrongly told by a travel agent (which their employer makes them use for all their business travel) that they must have an ETA to go to the UK.

[Brightonian]

There has been a similar issue since October 2021 (when it became necessary for EU citizens to have a passport to enter the UK) for the 1.5 million EU citizens who are resident in the UK but do not have a passport from their home country (because they arrived pre-Brexit, travelling on just their ID card). Too many checkin/gate agents have learned to repeat "Everyone. Must. Have. A. Full. Passport. To. Travel. To. The. UK." and are unaware that any exceptions exist.

I get a similar issue when I travel to the UK on my Irish Passport Card, which is a sort of halfway house between an ID card and a passport. It's great, I travel all over the EU on with no problem, but on at least two occasions going to the UK I would have been denied boarding (once by Ryanair, once by Easyjet) if I had not had my full passport with me. Showing the gov.uk page that explicitly mentions the card as acceptable for entering the UK did not help in either case. A couple of weeks ago I was nearly not let out of Spain by the outgoing passport control officers because "They won't let you into the UK with that", even though it's absolutely none of their business whether I get let in (at least the airlines can claim that they have to pay a fine if someone is refused entry).

Getting back to dual nationality, things are about to get even worse when ETIAS (the EU's own ETA) comes in, presumably in 2026 (although it has already slipped 3 or 4 times). Mrs sTeamTraen has a UK and a French passport. As mentioned in the OP she can't get a UK-ETA, so she has to go to the UK on her UK passport. Presumably similar restrictions (either "no other passport allowed" or "no EU residents can get one") will apply to ETIAS, so she will return to the EU on her French passport. This is no problem at the actual borders, but if you buy a return ticket on many airlines you only get to enter one passport number for the whole trip. So when the airlines start checking that you have either an ETA going the one way or an ETIAS going the other, she will fall foul of one or the other. Basically it's single tickets from now on. Fortunately the model of low-cost airlines means that you don't save by buying a return, but back in the days of PEX and APEX fares this would have been a huge disadvantage.

I have UK and Irish passports, which in theory is the best of all worlds because the Irish one is an EU passport (no ETIAS needed) and also gets you into the UK without an ETA because of the Common Travel Area. But I have already heard of one Irish person living in Spain being wrongly told by a travel agent (which their employer makes them use for all their business travel) that they must have an ETA to go to the UK.

I find that travelling on my Irish passport card is successful near 100% of the time. But then around 80% of the time I'm travelling either to or from Ireland.

I've had trouble at Orly when someone who was policing entry to the French border police point asked what passport I had. I made the mistake of replying "Irish", and she immediately waved me towards the automated passport gates. I produced my passport card and she immediately demanded "do you have a passport?!!" (I just mumbled "oui, j'ai un passeport" while pretending to dig into a pocket and marched past her towards the French police control.)

You see, Ireland is the only EU country that has passport cards, so airport etc. people often assume all EU people only have passport books. As an aside, a shop assistant in Paris asked me to leave my "carte d'identité" with them while I was checking something valuable. So I handed over my Irish passport card which she examined carefully, and asked me to explain what it was. She asked me to explain what it was, and she went "oh that is cool!", and we had a brief, enlightening discussion about passports.

Other times I've had difficulty with my passport card have generally been at St Pancras and Gare du Nord. A UK Border Force person flatly said "do you have any other sort of passport?" and I didn't like his body language so I produced my Irish passport book which he swiped silently. I was tempted to say the Irish passport card was perfectly valid but didn't dare.

[IvanV]

Getting back to dual nationality, things are about to get even worse when ETIAS (the EU's own ETA) comes in, presumably in 2026 (although it has already slipped 3 or 4 times). Mrs sTeamTraen has a UK and a French passport. As mentioned in the OP she can't get a UK-ETA, so she has to go to the UK on her UK passport. Presumably similar restrictions (either "no other passport allowed" or "no EU residents can get one") will apply to ETIAS, so she will return to the EU on her French passport. This is no problem at the actual borders, but if you buy a return ticket on many airlines you only get to enter one passport number for the whole trip. So when the airlines start checking that you have either an ETA going the one way or an ETIAS going the other, she will fall foul of one or the other. Basically it's single tickets from now on. Fortunately the model of low-cost airlines means that you don't save by buying a return, but back in the days of PEX and APEX fares this would have been a huge disadvantage.

I've just delivered my wife and daughter to the airport for another trip to Czech - my father-in-laws funeral tomorrow, fortunately I got out of that. And fortunately my daughter has both her passports with her for this trip.

Ryanair wouldn't accept a Czech passport as a travel document for her until she went into her profile and changed her nationality to Czech. She will be coming back on her British passport. I wonder when Ryanair gets annoyed of her changing nationality repeatedly. Or perhaps grows up and lets people have more than one nationality. She has previously had problems with "where is your entry stamp" when trying to leave Czech on a British passport. So she has now decided she will just hand both passports over at the Czech border and let them work out what to do.

[Si_B]

I always travel with both my DE and UK passports when travelling to and from the EU. The simple thing to remember is to use the passport associated with the border you are crossing.

The UK is slightly odd as you do not generally go through formal passport control on exiting the UK, so it isn't an issue yet when leaving. So I usually don't bother getting my UK passport out on the outward journey. When entering the EU, I enter on the DE passport. When exiting the EU at the departure airport, I present the DE passport at Border control then pack it away in my hand baggage. This will also remove any chance of accidentally getting pulled over and questionned for apparently breaking the 90/180 day rule in the EU since EU citizens can stay as long as they like in the EU (but generally have to register if you stay in one country for 90 days or more in one go). When arriving back in the UK, I use the UK passport. A friend of mine got detained for hours at Gatwick when he forgot his UK passport and the Border Force asked him where he lived. "Here" he said. But his EU passport didn't have a settled status flag (because as a UK citizen he doesn't need it). Eventually, his wife drove down with his UK passport and they let him out with a warning to use the UK passport next time.

It gets daft when using Eurostar. In that case the two border controls are next to each other, so you have to present the exit passport at the first and then walk 10 feet swap passports and produce the entrance passport at the next.

What is also annoying is most airlines don't allow you to store multiple nationalities so that you can check in with the correct one for your destination, so you have to keep manually changing it! When ETIAS comes in, I will probably have to delay check-in until the last minute for the return (as most airlines allow you to change the details when you check-in - but not all). I am already used to this - on my last BA flight to NL, I checked in for the outward leg using my DE passport details and checked in for the return leg from NL using the UK passport details. Fortunately, I did not have to put in my API details beforehand. TIming will become crucial.

It gets more complicated - my brother has three nationalities - he is also a US Citizen. US law makes it mandatory for US Citizens to leave and enter the US using their US passport only. Thus when visiting us and our European cousins, he has to take all three passports and remember which border he is at and whether he is entering or exiting!

Pre-Brexit, I could travel anywhere in the EU with no passport and just my DE ID Card - now I need my UK passport and either the DE passport or ID Card (I usually use the passport as you generally can't use ID cards in eGates and so have to queue for a manual check).

It's bl..dy annoying!

[Lew Dolby]

All you lot with EU passports as well as UK should count your blessings. Those Brexit bastards stole my EU citizenship and I really resent it !!

/rant/

[jimbob]

All you lot with EU passports as well as UK should count your blessings. Those Brexit bastards stole my EU citizenship and I really resent it !!

/rant/

Well said

[Brightonian]

I've technically got four nationalities, though I only bother having passports for two (UK and Ireland). I routinely claim to be Irish for basically everything (though tax-resident in the UK because reasons), just to reduce unnecessary complications in my affairs. Even so, I still have to deal with tax authorities, banks etc. in four countries. Spending large parts of my time doing admin does my head in.

[Opti]

All you lot with EU passports as well as UK should count your blessings. Those Brexit bastards stole my EU citizenship and I really resent it !!

/rant/

I hear you. Brexit forced me to make choice, so I made the choice to move to Spain and get Residencia. It doesn't excuse me from the 90/180 rule in the rest of the EU but travelling across Europe I don't get any passport stamps - I don't know why not.
Travelling to the UK doesn't worry me at all as I have no reason anymore to go back there. I've been back 2 times since I moved here (for gigs). The UK disappointed me on both occasions. It's easier to go to Germany/France/Italy for gigs now.
In 5 years I will be eligible to apply for for Spanish citizenship as long as my Spanish and Spanish history are of sufficient - and if I live that long.

[IvanV]

A friend of mine got detained for hours at Gatwick when he forgot his UK passport and the Border Force asked him where he lived. "Here" he said. But his EU passport didn't have a settled status flag (because as a UK citizen he doesn't need it). Eventually, his wife drove down with his UK passport and they let him out with a warning to use the UK passport next time.

This is what I was worried might happen to my daughter last time she travelled on only her Czech passport, but she was lucky. She just went through the e-gate at Luton and it let her in. She would have been able to show them a picture of her British passport, she had that on her phone, if stopped, and I wondered if that would be enough. For it would be a very long drive for me to fetch her British passport from her university room where she left it: she'd have had to spend the night at the airport. I suspect they just hadn't updated the software on the e-gates at Luton yet to check whether there is an ETA or settled status attached to the passport. But I expect they will get round to it eventually.

Yes, she is lucky to have that dual nationality. But the authorities here and in the EU, and the airlines, are being unnecessarily silly about it.

[shpalman]

All you lot with EU passports as well as UK should count your blessings. Those Brexit bastards stole my EU citizenship and I really resent it !!

/rant/

I hear you. Brexit forced me to make choice, so I made the choice to move to Spain and get Residencia. It doesn't excuse me from the 90/180 rule in the rest of the EU but travelling across Europe I don't get any passport stamps - I don't know why not.
Travelling to the UK doesn't worry me at all as I have no reason anymore to go back there. I've been back 2 times since I moved here (for gigs). The UK disappointed me on both occasions. It's easier to go to Germany/France/Italy for gigs now.
In 5 years I will be eligible to apply for for Spanish citizenship as long as my Spanish and Spanish history are of sufficient - and if I live that long.

Well, I'm similar, except that I've been eligible for Italian citizenship for a while now and I haven't been bothered about doing it.

There's no need to stamp passports when travelling around in Schengen because they don't check at the borders, they keep track of where you're staying.

[Opti]

Aah! it's pretty obvious if you give it a moments thought.

This should have been in 'what have learned today' thread too.

[headshot]

All you lot with EU passports as well as UK should count your blessings. Those Brexit bastards stole my EU citizenship and I really resent it !!

/rant/

I hear you. Brexit forced me to make choice, so I made the choice to move to Spain and get Residencia. It doesn't excuse me from the 90/180 rule in the rest of the EU but travelling across Europe I don't get any passport stamps - I don't know why not.
Travelling to the UK doesn't worry me at all as I have no reason anymore to go back there. I've been back 2 times since I moved here (for gigs). The UK disappointed me on both occasions. It's easier to go to Germany/France/Italy for gigs now.
In 5 years I will be eligible to apply for for Spanish citizenship as long as my Spanish and Spanish history are of sufficient - and if I live that long.

Well, I'm similar, except that I've been eligible for Italian citizenship for a while now and I haven't been bothered about doing it.

There's no need to stamp passports when travelling around in Schengen because they don't check at the borders, they keep track of where you're staying.

Do they? How?

Frau HS and I recently travelled to Switzerland via Le Shuttle and we visited Bruges, Saarbrucken, Colmar, Interlaken, Bern, Basel, and Ghent.

We could have travelled anywhere else within Schengen and we didn't have to show any passports once we left Calais - except at the first hotel where we stayed for only one night.

[sTeamTraen]

There's no need to stamp passports when travelling around in Schengen because they don't check at the borders, they keep track of where you're staying.

I'm pretty sure they don't. In France and Germany you don't need to show ID to check in to a hotel (hence the prevalence, especially in France, of the motel chains on the edge of towns where you can get the world's most austere room for €45), and even in countries where you do, that information is not communicated to "the Schengen authorities", because for all practical purposes there are no Schengen authorities.

If you read the EU directives and regulations closely, it becomes clear that the EU (a) knows that there are imperfections in the 90-in-180 system, particularly as it applies to people who have unlimited time in one Schengen country because they have a residency card, and (b) they have decided that they don't really care.

Immigration of non-EU nationals is a wonderful mish-mash of EU and national law. For example, the EU limits you to 90-in-180 within the Schengen area, but each country decides what the fine or other punishment is when you get caught leaving after 91, 95, or 200 days.

The recent UK-EU deal, "allowing UK citizens to use e-gates", is another case in point. The EU doesn't know or care if you enter the Schengen area at a French or Spanish or Greek airport using "an e-gate". They just want to know that you got a stamp so they can keep track of your 90 days. And when EES comes in, as long as you go to the EES kiosk (run by the EU) and register your photo and fingerprints, the EU does not care how you then enter the member state in question; that could be via a staffed desk, or an e-gate, as this handy video makes clear. (EES itself is not part of the entry process, and could potentially be carried out at the departure airport.)

[DJL]

I have UK and French passports and have got adept at changing nationalities in the 20 metres that separate the border control points at the Shuttle terminals in Calais and Folkestone. It feels a bit odd changing language mid-conversation, but I suppose that's all part of the fun.

[eliot10]

Honestly? Dual nationals are stuck playing passport gymnastics until the systems catch up.