A family had to cancel a £3,000 dream trip to Disneyland Paris after they were caught up in passport delays. A series of problems affected the long-awaited trip, including their return flight being cancelled by easyJet.
Stuart McLean was due to head to France this month with his wife to celebrate one of his two young girls' fifth birthday for five days of fun in the theme park, just outside the French capital. They had applied for passports for their girls back in February and expected a wait of up to five to seven week, giving them in theory plenty of time, EdinburghLive reports.
But, delays in the passport office meant that while one of their daughter's passports did arrive after four weeks, the other didn't. The couple got nowhere when they chased for an update and then found out weeks before they were due to fly that easyJet had cancelled their return flight.
Still missing one passport, the Edinburgh couple cancelled the trip to ensure they got their £3,000 costs back. The delayed passport eventually turned up on the day they would have gone on the holiday.
Stuart said: "We had been taking our daughter for her fifth birthday, and had applied for the passports at the start of February. We ordered both of our daughters' passports at the same time and then had them verified by the same person at the same time.
"For some reason they accepted one and not the other because you can't use the same person to verify twice, but we phoned up and they said it was fine and to apply again and they'd put a note on the file.
"It didn't work again but we got someone different to verify and then it was sorted. One came within four weeks but there was no sign of the one for our two-year old."
As their departure date of May 10 continued to get closer, the McLeans were unable to get through to the passport office for an update, and were then made aware their flights had also been disrupted.
Stuart added: "My wife was in a Disney Facebook group and someone had posted saying easyJet had cancelled a lot of flights so we had a look and realised our return flight had been cancelled, but were given a full refund from them.
"At the point it was two weeks to go, we were looking at alternative return flights but Air France was a lot more expensive and we still hadn't got anything from the passport and you can only get a refund from Disneyland if you cancel less than a week before. We had spent in total around £3,000 on the trip so we cancelled the full thing to make sure we got the money back."
Hoping to have treated their girls to a well-earned break, the family are now looking into rebooking the trip for October 2022 instead, with the final passport arriving the afternoon of the day they were meant to fly on May 10.
The dad-of-two said: "We had had it booked for about seven months, the last couple of years the kids have really struggled, they have had all their classes groups and nursery things cancelled so we just wanted to give them a nice holiday.
"But we were planning to surprise my daughter on the day we flew for her birthday so luckily she was none the wiser."
Passport 'chaos' continues
Passport Office “chaos” has left people experiencing phone hotline waits of up to nine hours, making 40 calls and also missing key family events, MPs have warned today. The Home Office faced demands to reveal when the backlog will be cleared and to offer compensation to people who do not have their passport applications sorted within 10 weeks.
Home Office minister, Tom Pursglove, said the 10-week target is “not guaranteed” but insisted 700 extra staff will have been recruited “by the summer” to help. The Government expects 9.5 million British passport applications to be dealt with in 2022, with Covid restrictions on travel resulting in just four million applications in 2020 and five million in 2021 by comparison.
Mr Pursglove, responding to an urgent question in the House of Commons on Thursday (May 12) , said nearly two million applications were processed between March and April this year.
He also insisted the “vast majority” of applications continue to be processed “well within 10 weeks, with over 90% of applications issued within six weeks between January and March 2022, and less than 1.4% of the passports printed last week for UK applications have been in the system for longer than 10 weeks”.
But Labour MP Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent), who asked the urgent question, said: “A constituent told me yesterday, ‘It is terrible – we are due to fly out on Sunday but are still unable to get our youngest son’s passport. Every time I phone I get passed to a different department, then hold, then the phone line goes dead’.
“Another told me, ‘I have called 40 times in the past week, they cut me off every time. I don’t know what to do and I am breaking down at this point’.
“The facts are there are long queues outside passport offices, hours and hours spent on phone lines, and families afraid of holidays getting cancelled.”
