So here I am on Roatan in Honduras with no printer, no scanner, and no photocopier. I’ll spare you the details, but the bottom line is that to pay for some flights on Tropic Air this week I was required to send over a copy of my passport and a signed credit card authorization form to their reservations department. Other than the poor Germans, who had to wait three weeks for their foreign ministry to issue them replacement passports out of Germany, most everyone was able to get on their way again in less than a week, and those photocopies definitely helped.Įver since then, I always keep one or more photocopies of my passport, including any key visa or visit permit pages, with me, and I carry the photocopy, not the actual passport when I go out and about locally while outside the U.S.īut what about keeping a digital copy of your passport? visas previously so I could more readily re-issue them with visas when they got their new passports. This helped them obtain replacement passports from their home embassies, and it helped me verify that they had U.S. What impressed me was how some of the non-Americans had photocopies of the information pages of their passports, as well as a copy of the page with their U.S. They had been staying at a guest house on one of the out islands and someone stole the guest house’s lock box, which held all the guests’ passports. A group of people, some Americans, but also folks of five or six other nationalities, showed up in my office one day. I learned first-hand the value of carrying a photocopy of one’s passport some years ago while serving as Vice Consul at the U.S. But I had an experience this week that also confirmed the importance of having your passport and other key documents in digital form. That’s valuable advice, both to help prevent having your passport pick-pocketed on the street, and also to assist with replacing a lost or stolen passport. I think most travelers have heard how it’s important to carry a photocopy of their passport when traveling.

Travel Advice: Is a photocopy of your passport enough? -By Frank J.

Photocopy passport