Passport, please.
I wrote this at the airport in Barcelona waiting for a flight to Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin.
At check-in I wasn’t asked whether I had packed my bags myself of if I’d been with them constantly. It took about ten minutes total (including waiting in line) to get through security. The buzzer went when I went through the metal detector. The security guy didn’t send me back, he just frisked me quickly and thoroughly right there. No one asked me to take off my shoes or my belt. After checking in, no one asked me for my passport. Overall, extremely painless and with a minimum of nonsense.
I’ve left London a couple of times in the last month. Both times no one asked to see my passport until I was at the gate about to go down the tunnel to the plane. I was traveling without baggage and had printed my boarding cards at home. So the only person who looked at my passport was a regular Easyjet employee, who glanced at my face and the face in the passport and handed it back.
This is international travel in Western Europe today. It’s not always this easy, but it usually is.
Compare this to the pleasures of domestic US travel. Actually, I wont, but if you’ve done much US travel post-9/11 you’ll know what I’m referring to. Suffice to say I’m not looking forward to half a dozen US flights I have coming up.
Interestingly, between entering the plane and getting to my hotel in Berlin, I didn’t hear anyone speaking anything but German. Not a word of English or Spanish or anything else. There were probably 150 people on the plane, so it’s not as though I was alone.
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