New Year’s Eve 2017 is a night we will never forget!
Even if we wanted to.
And, WE DO.
Out of simplicity, I am attaching the following letter to Eurowings, which pretty much tells the whole story.
Please, keep in mind the goal of this letter was to elicit empathy (and hopefully some compensation?!) from the recipient – Eurowings – but definitely NOT sympathy from anyone else!! As you will see in the subsequent post, we are now happily sipping the lemonade we made from our New Year’s lemons.
January 3, 2018
To Whom It May Concern:
We are a family of three – two adults and our 13-year-old son. Between 2016 and 2017, we sold our family business, sold our car, rented our house, and put our belongings in a storage unit so we could travel the world for a year. On August 1, 2017, with just the packs on our back, we left the United States and have been on the road ever since.
Before traveling to a new place, we routinely check the Centers for Disease Control and the US State Department for country-specific requirements. Before booking, we look for vendor-specific requirements. Once travel is booked, we read through the confirmations, receipts, etc. and put them in one folder for easy access and reference. In short, we consider ourselves to be informed, organized travelers.
For this reason, we were stunned when on New Year’s Eve, we were unable to board our scheduled flight to Cape Town, South Africa. After flying from Barcelona to Cologne/Bonn, where we had a four-hour layover, we went through immigration and waited in line at the gate. When we eventually made it to the Eurowings representative checking boarding passes and passports, she looked through our passports, saw that our son was under 18, and told us she needed to see his birth certificate, a requirement for all minors entering South Africa. We explained that his birth certificate had been used to secure his passport, but were told that that was irrelevant. She showed us some highlighted fine print in an unidentified, well-worn document as evidence, and asked us to step aside while the other passengers were checked through the line.
Shortly thereafter, a family of five was detained for the same reason, oddly enough from our same hometown. As we waited, we re-read our documentation from Eurowings and could not find anything about this requirement. Two additional Eurowings personnel eventually came to the gate to confirm that we would not be able to board the plane. Obviously distressed, we asked for advice on how to proceed, but no one was able to help us.
At 11:45 pm on New Year’s Eve, we didn’t have a place to stay, and were not able to contact banks, US governmental agencies, consulates or embassies until January 2nd. The Eurowings desk was closed. When we called Eurowings customer service, the agent kept referring to a flight booked in our name from Cologne to Barcelona on January 1st – a flight we did not book, did not ask for, and was not aware of. When eventually he found our missed flight, he said he could not help us directly, but we could outline our situation, send it to the email address he provided, and we could expect a response within five weeks.
We took a taxi to an airport hotel nearby so we could assess our situation and figure out a plan that would enable us to salvage part of our trip to South Africa (a destination we’d long dreamed of visiting) before flying from Johannesburg to Singapore on January 25th. Our son’s original birth certificate is in a safe deposit box in Lafayette, California and the key is with my cousin in Washington state. The key could be mailed to someone local, but as the box was acquired just before we left, only my husband and I are authorized to access it. We considered flying home and back, but last minute flights were few and expensive. We found an agency online, Vitalchek, that processes birth records for the City of San Francisco in 5-10 days and immediately applied and paid online. The confirmation email we received, however, stated that in order to initiate the process, applicants outside the US must first give a sworn statement “before an Embassador, Minister, Consul, Vice Consul, or Consular Agent of the United States, or before any Judge of a Court of record having a seal in such foreign country.”
The next day, the 1st, we took a train to Dusseldorf (the nearest town with a consulate) and booked a hotel room. On the 2nd we discovered that the Dusseldorf consulate no longer provides services to US citizens. Next we tried the US consulate in Frankfurt and the embassy in Berlin, but neither answered their phones directly and neither had appointments available through the online reservation system we were referred to until mid-January. We discovered all of these agencies require appointments for everything and all have extremely limited opening hours. I reached an actual person at the consulate in Frankfurt, but ultimately was only able to leave a voice message for a person who was out of the office. Jeff tried going to the closest courthouse in Dusseldorf to see if he could get some guidance and was given the address of a different courthouse to try. When he went to that location the following day, however, it was closed.
We then looked outside of Germany to cities that had a consulate/embassy and an airport with service to South Africa. We were able to make an appointment with the US consulate in Zurich, Switzerland, on Friday, January 5th and booked a Eurowings flight there. Before our appointment, we followed up with Vitalchek for an estimate of when we would receive the birth certificate if they had our notarized sworn statement by Friday morning. Unfortunately, they said, they couldn’t guarantee delivery in time for a flight from Zurich to Cape Town mid-month. On the advice of an attorney friend, we contacted our trust attorney and she confirmed that she could apply for, receive, and overnight the birth certificate on our son’s behalf for a fee of $500. In the meantime, our expenses continue to accrue:
- Airfare for 3 from Barcelona to Cape Town via Cologne/Bonn
- 10 days lodging in Cape Town, South Africa
- 25-day car rental in South Africa
- Taxi to/from hotel airport
- Hotel near airport
- International phone call charges
- Train fare for 3: Cologne/Bonn Airport to Dusseldorf (for consulate)
- Hotel room in Dusseldorf (3 nights)
- Train fare for 3: Dusseldorf to Cologne/Bonn Airport
- Air fare for 3 to Zurich
- Accommodations in Zurich
- Attorney fee for acquiring/sending birth certificate
- Zurich mail center fees for receipt of document
Hopefully you can see from the below that this fiasco (one that the Eurowings personnel confirmed is commonplace) is the result of a stringent requirement easily missed when researching travel to South Africa, even by conscientious travelers.
No mention of South Africa’s birth certificate requirement is made on the Eurowings web site when researching flights to South Africa:
On the US State Department’s site, in order to find South Africa’s birth certificate requirement, you must scroll below the “Quick Facts” section that opens automatically, expand the “Entry, Exit and Visa Requirements section” and follow a link to South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs web site.
It is not mentioned on WikiTravel’s South Africa page or on the more specific Air Travel in South Africa.
It is not mentioned onTripAdvisor’s main South Africa page. It is not mentioned in the more specific, South Africa: Crossing the Border or in the link to more information on the Home Affairs Department provided in that article.
While I believe in the concept of “caveat emptor,” in this case the seller is clearly aware of product information that is not easily accessible to the buyer. It seems that a requirement with such potentially drastic consequences for travelers to South Africa, should be made evident on the airlines’ web sites, in the booking confirmations, and once again at the time of check-in. If any of these safeguards had been in place, we would not be in this predicament.
We exchanged contact information with the family of five who were also unable to fly on New Year’s Eve and discovered that their solution involved flying back to the US in order to obtain the required birth certificates. They were, however, compensated for their initial flight to South Africa, which they booked through United Airlines. We are hopeful that Eurowings will consider a similar compensation for us. I’m currently working on our New Year’s Eve/Day travel blog post, which will include this letter, and I’d like to be able to commend Eurowings for doing the right thing.
Sincerely,
Catherine Jordan
Individual Reservation Code: AG9ZTH
Flight No (Barcelona – Cologne): EW 0527
Flight No (Cologne – Cape Town): EW126 Cologne to Cape Town