We all know how important it is to fill in any travel document application correctly however recently an elderly man was refused his travel authorisation to the US because he accidently said he was a terrorist!
Reported by The Independent, John Stevenson was due to fly out on a last chance dream trip to New York with his wife when disaster struck. The couple who have been married for decades had saved every penny for their holiday. Mr Stevenson is 70 years old and has always dreamed of a holiday in New York and with his age he believed this would be his last ever chance to travel to the US.
Mr Stevenson was applying online for an ESTA (electronic system for travel authorisation) which is a document that allows you to travel to the US without going through the sometimes long and arduous application process for a full tourist travel document. There are many countries across the globe who are part of this waiver programme and the UK is one of them.
At the end of the application there is a set of eligibility questions and this is where the tragedy happened. One of the questions reads ‘Do you seek to engage in or have ever engaged in terrorist activities, espionage, sabotage or genocide’ and Mr Stevenson accidently clicked yes to this. As you can imagine, this lead to the travel document being denied meaning the couples dreams of a holiday in New York where now in tatters. Mr Stevenson has stated that whilst completing the application his computer crashed and he believes this lead to the answer being changed from no to yes. What the couple will now need to do is apply for a tourist travel document to the US which may not be approved by their date of travel.
This situation would be heart-breaking for those involved which is why we advise using a management service like ourselves to complete your ESTA application. Our specialists scrutinise every application to ensure the best possible outcome for our applicants. If Mr Stevenson had used our service we would have contacted him as we always do if any of the eligibility questions are answered yes. We would have checked if he had meant to answer the question that way and corrected it prior to submitting the application to the US Border Control.
A simple phone call would have saved this man’s dream holiday and prevented all of his devastation.
Posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2018 at 4:21 pm in Latest News.
