How to best use Second and/or Third passport to maximise visa-free travel?

[Nigital Domad]

Question from a client: What is a good logistical approach for utilising different passports in order to have the most visa-free travel?
For instanze; if you fly into Country 1 using passport A - but want to fly out using passport B so that you can land in Country 2 without having to get a visa (because Passport B allows you to arrive there visa-free), how is this best accomplished?
Airlines seem to force you to leave on the same passport you arrived on (as do most nation's customs / border control).
Is there any way around this (other than perhaps arriving with Passport A by plane - and leaving with Passport B by car/boat)?

 

[daniels27]

Airlines seem to force you to leave on the same passport you arrived on (as do most nation's customs / border control).

I would say mainly the border control. The airlines in general don't care much, they only check your passport if it matches your bording pass.

Is there any way around this (other than perhaps arriving with Passport A by plane - and leaving with Passport B by car/boat)?

This won't help much as the border control is the main guy who cares.

Question from a client: What is a good logistical approach for utilising different passports in order to have the most visa-free travel?

@jafo once explained this:

https://www.offshorecorptalk.com/threads/traveling-with-2-passports.43615/#post-285825

In other words, you can fly from A to X and then to B. Where X is a country that does not stamp passports. When you arrive in B, you can just claim you where in X last and they did not stamp. But honestly, the easiest is just to use air travel as must countries do not care where and how you got there. You could have booked SIN to BNE but who knows where you were before. BNE has been all over and so have you. Maybe, you flew JKF-LHR-DXB-KUL-SIN without even entering any of those countries? If you want to enter on a British passport, you just show them fake travel bookings from LHR to wherever you boarded last. You can do this a couple of times and then you'll soon figure out that most countries won't care how you got there.

The much bigger problem is when leaving. Let's say you are British and North Macedonian, you are in London and want to visit Cuba. Now, you can enter Cuba visa free on your North Macedonian passport but not on your UK one. Hence, when leaving UK, you will book all with your UK passport for border control. But when you are at the gate, they will check for your visa or whatever. You then need to pull out the North Macedonian passport. As far as I know, UK won't care about this as they allow dual citizenship and have no issues with this. But what if you are Chinese and hiding a European passports from them? You cannot simply fly out of Beijing with your Chinese passport and then claim that you can actually enter Schengen with your European passport. Because the airlines there know very well, that you cannot have any other passport. Hence, you will have to fly through any other country that does not care anymore.

 

[HardRJones]

This is largely theoretical knowledge at this point since I’m in the process of obtaining second, third, and fourth passports as of writing.

The US doesn’t have true exit control. You might get stopped by CBP randomly in the airport, but I have never seen nor heard of that actually happening. The US SecureFlight database links passports to people and relies on airline manifest reporting. You can use one to check in for the flight, a second to go through TSA security, and the first to board, if desired, and it would be sorted out behind the scenes.

Coming in, you’d use the appropriate passport to check in for the flight and to present to CBP. Presumably that would be your US passport (if a US citizen) or your Canadian, VWP, or passport associated with your visa or green card.

In countries with true exit control (like Italy, in this example), you are supposed to use the passport for entry to the destination at airline check in and boarding, but use the passport you entered Italy on at exit control. Having gone through Italian airports (and others, like Turkey or other EU nations), these are discrete stages and you could, in theory, swap passports between them.

I would (here is where it becomes theoretical, at least until later this year) from the US book the flight with my Italian passport and check in for the flight with my Italian passport. I would present my US passport at the TSA security point. I would present my Italian passport at the gate for boarding (if needed). There are a couple of things here. One, in the US, your boarding pass is marked “Docs OK” after check in and so I believe any passport would work at the gate. It’s an ID check against the name on the boarding pass. My wife does not get asked for anything with her less than desirable passport at that point. Two, I’ve been on some flights to Europe where they just take pictures of your face and no passport is presented at boarding.

At any rate, I would present my Italian passport at Italian entry control. I would book a flight to the third destination (Russia, in this example) using my Serbian passport and use that for check in. I’d switch to my Italian passport for exit control and then back to my Serbian passport for boarding and entry into Russia.

There are some complicating factors. One was mentioned above, in the case of China, where you are not supposed to have that second passport. The best case there seems to be to plan a stopover in a third country and switch passports there. Communication between immigration across countries is inconsistent from my (incomplete) knowledge. The other is that I don’t know how well other countries without formal exit control handle multiple passports. I don’t remember going through exit control for Ireland or Japan but haven’t the slightest clue how their systems work.

I’ll be experimenting with this later this year to see how well the theory lines up with practice.

 

[daniels27]

US SecureFlight database links passports to people and relies on airline manifest reporting.

And it is buggy. If your flight is overbooked and you opt to fly one day later, your I-94 may show that you left twice.

You can use one to check in for the flight, a second to go through TSA security, and the first to board, if desired, and it would be sorted out behind the scenes.

The TSA checks against a name in the bording pass database. You can even use a US driving licence at that point if you fly to Europe.

I would (here is where it becomes theoretical, at least until later this year) from the US book the flight with my Italian passport and check in for the flight with my Italian passport. I would present my US passport at the TSA security point.

You can just use your driving licence at that point.

I would present my Italian passport at the gate for boarding (if needed). There are a couple of things here. One, in the US, your boarding pass is marked “Docs OK” after check in and so I believe any passport would work at the gate. It’s an ID check against the name on the boarding pass. My wife does not get asked for anything with her less than desirable passport at that point.

Normally, they check at that point if you actually have a passport unless this has been done during check-in. Because if you do, you will be refused entry at your next country and sent back at the expense of the airline.

There are some complicating factors. One was mentioned above, in the case of China, where you are not supposed to have that second passport. The best case there seems to be to plan a stopover in a third country and switch passports there.

You need to book separate tickets and then stay in the stopover country no less than the allowed days, including those that you are out elsewhere.

The other is that I don’t know how well other countries without formal exit control handle multiple passports. I don’t remember going through exit control for Ireland or Japan but haven’t the slightest clue how their systems work.

Most countries apart from US, Canada, CTA (UK/IE) have proper exit controls. Japan has exit control, exit stamp is no longer mandatory but available upon request.

 

[HardRJones]

According to the internet, Japan does have exit control. Last time I was there, I don’t even remember going through it (Narita) so it must have been unobtrusive. I don’t know how Ireland knows people have left.

I-94s are not issued on every entry. US citizens, PRs, VWPs, and a few other exceptions don’t get them. I just tried to look up my wife’s arrival and departure history as a test and they have no record of her, but she is a permanent resident now. I do have copies of her I-94s issued from before she got her green card, but they appear to no longer be accessible. VWPs get ESTAs which are linked in to their records in ADIS (which also pulls from APIS as part of preclearance) and may or may not still get I-94Ws. CBP and TSA are accessing the same databases (the boarding pass database is Secure Flight, which draws from APIS/ADIS; ADIS does a lot of the work) but care about different things from it. I’ll run some tests with a driver’s license and a second passport (should have one this summer) at the TSA checkpoint at the next opportunity, but I’ll only be able to tell you if they complain or not. I don’t know exactly where the airlines hit these databases or what they can pull from it, but the information exchange is bidirectional. I also don’t know exactly what each party cares about from them or what rules generate alerts, nor how well the entire thing works.

Some light reading on the subject:
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/privacy-pia-024c-adis-december2020.pdf
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pia-tsa-spqs018i-april2019_1.pdf

Anecdotal evidence indicates that on exit you use the passport allowing entry to the destination to book and check-in, that it does not matter what you use at the TSA checkpoint, and that any passport will work at the gate for boarding. Enter using the passport that is linked to something that will give you access (green card, ESTA, visa) since they’ll ask for it at passport control. They are very clear that if you have a green card you show both it and the passport associated with it on entry. US citizens must use US passports. I don’t know what would happen if you had an ESTA on a French passport and also had a UK passport but used the UK passport to enter. I do suspect that if you have a visa in one passport they will ask you for it if you provide a different passport. The latter two aren’t things I can test.