A woman flew to the Canary Islands from Cardiff Airport - using her husband’s passport - the South Wales Echo reports. Andrea Cole, 43, of Llanishen, Cardiff, told the newspaper of her shock at passing unchallenged through two sets of checks at the airport, after unwittingly taking husband’s passport on a holiday with her mum. She did not realise her mistake until she had boarded her flight. But she was still able to get past immigration checks at her destination without anyone raising the alarm.
Mrs Cole was flying to her villa from Cardiff on July 2 with her mother. She said: ‘At the check-in desk everything seemed fine - they checked both passports, departures was fine and the passports were checked again before getting on the plane.'
‘But on the plane I looked at what I thought was my passport, and it wasn’t. I had inadvertently taken my husband’s instead of my own. This was not noticed either at check-in or boarding. I am neither a man nor resemble my husband’s passport photo!'
Mrs Cole said she had no idea what to do or how immigration would react when they landed in the Canary Islands. She told the newspaper: ‘To our amazement the passport was checked and given straight back to me. The man physically took the passport, opened it, looked at me and handed it back. That is three times security had failed and we were granted entry to Fuerteventura.’
'This is supposed to be a time of heightened security. You can’t take a bottle of water through security, but they let someone though with the wrong passport.’
A spokeswoman for Cardiff Airport said Servisair, the company blamed for another mix-up involving sending a family to Turkey rather than the Canaries by mistake this week, were in charge of checking customers in and seeing them through the gate onto the plane.
She told the Echo: ‘The airport is again disappointed at the performance of an outside agency working on behalf of an airline. We will be investigating the issue as soon as we have confirmation of the details from Servisair and Thomas Cook.’
A Servisair spokesman said: ‘We take security very seriously and we are investigating Mrs Cole’s statement about being allowed through two passport checks on a journey abroad from Cardiff Airport. However, as this took place over 3 weeks ago it is proving more time consuming than usual.’
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