JFC Travel Blog

As reported by the UK Department for Transport, Spain is introducing Advance Passenger Information (API) reporting on all flights arriving from outside the Schengen area from today (19 June 2007). Basically this means that certain items of personal information including passport number and date of birth are passed to the Spanish authorities before take off, this information will usually be collected either at the check-in desk or online. The reason listed for this rule is for law enforcement policies. However, it’s so easy to avoid this information collection that this new procedure is just a total waste of time.

It’s easy, as the law only applies to flights from non-Schengen countries all you have to do is first of all fly to a Schengen country and then fly onwards to Spain. So for example, if you’re flying KLM or Lufthansa you will be flying via a Schengen country and therefore not required to provide this extra info.

As you can move freely between Schengen countries it means there is no point any country in the Schengen zone being more restrictive as it’s easy to circumvent this by flying to another Schengen country first.

So who decided that this new rule was a good idea? Were they previously head of security at Microsoft?

Schengen countries are currently Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Austria, Greece, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The UK chose to opt out of the Schengen free travel zone and Ireland is unable to join due to a previous free travel arrangement with the UK. More info here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 9:22 am and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.