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I see in the rules that it requires 3 months of validity, but some travel sites recommend 6 months? Do I have any reason to worry? Can they reject me at the border, even if the rules state 3 months?
The reason that some travel sites recommend 6 months is because countries within the Schengen area--probably where you are traveling--had different requirements.
The issue was that some Schengen countries would essentially assume that your trip would automatically be 3 months long (length of visa free travel). So if you landed with 5 months remaining, you would not have enough remaining time on the passport at their estimated time of your departure, regardless of what your flight itinerary said. This also caused plenty of problems with people being rejected boarding even if they could have gotten into the country, because of lax enforcement at the destination, or even confusion at the airlines.
So the safe rule was to land with at least 6 months remaining at time of arrival.
I personally know people who ran into issues with this, and you really don't want the types of problems they had.
Renewing before your trip in May would indeed be wise. Then you don't have to sweat the details.
You can renew any time within six months before the expiration date.
Get the Passport card while you're at it. It's good for travel to Canada and some other places. I like to use it for ID rather than my driver's license. For somethings that require a SSN and photo ID I use the passport card. This way they don't have two major forms of ID in case something or someone gets hacked.
I use it for drug testing for my commercial drivers license, they don't ask me for the license.
If you are flying, the airline can reject you if you are traveling to a place that requires six months in your Passport.
Absolutely! good point.
Some friends of my missed part of their vacation to Portugal last fall because of that. And it was at the international departure when they were boarding that the airline stopped them, rather than back home in Chicago, so they ended up stuck in Philly until they sorted it out.
If it is due to expire some three months after you go off, I would certainly renew it before hand. Different countries have various rules, but to be on the safe side, renew it now! I have seen enough times were someone traveling abroad was denied entry because the passport was too close to expiration. So, yes go renew it now.
We went through regular channels last year and received our passport in 4 weeks.
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