Canada says refrain from traveling with two passports

Immigration Matter

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is advising members of the public who have been issued new E-passports and who wish to travel to Canada to refrain from travelling with both their old and new passports.

Rather, persons are advised to transfer the visa counterfoil to the new passport to avoid delays at the airport when boarding flights to Canada.

According to the statement issued late last Friday, “delays happen as result of airline representatives entering details from two separate passport documents.

“This procedure will itself result in the Interactive Advance Passenger Information (IAPI) detecting conflicting information from the new and cancelled passports, and subsequently relaying a ‘No Board’ prompt. Additional time is now required to override the system in order to generate a boarding pass, all of which result in inconvenience to both airline and passengers.”

In addition, “the transferred visa will have the same duration of validity as the original visa, and biometric enrollment is not required. If a traveler wishes to apply for a new visa for the duration of the validity of the new passport, then it is considered a new application and would therefore be subject to biometric enrollment, if the citizen has not already enrolled their biometrics since December 31, 2018.”