Travel Question: Why is Eurostar exempt from API?

Q Any idea why Eurostar is apparently exempt from Advance Passenger Information? You don’t need to use information from your passport (or national ID card) to book, as you do on airlines and Eurotunnel.

Name supplied

A Let’s start with what Advance Passenger Information (API) actually is, and what it isn’t. Before you travel abroad, your destination country typically wants to know your full name, gender, date of birth and nationality, and also the number, issuer and expiry date of your passport or identity card. The idea is that the authorities have time to check your details against “watch lists” and decide if they want to investigate you further on arrival. In the case of departing the UK, from which there is no routine outbound passport control, API also allows the Home Office to know when people leave Britain.

API is not primarily to do with security during the journey (for example, to detect potential hijackers), though some countries, notably the US, want to know your personal details before you board a flight in order to check them against lists of terrorism suspects. Nor is API a substitute for a visa – or other travel authority, such as an Australia e-Visitor or Canadian eTA.

Some transport operators, particularly airlines, are prone to saying something like: “Unless you supply your API in advance of turning up at the airport, you can’t travel.” This is nonsense. In fact, the required information is all contained in the “machine readable zone” on the photo page of your passport. It has two lines of text as letters, numbers and chevrons. It is far easier for a machine to read and extract the key information correctly than it is for a human, and this is exactly what Eurostar does. At the departure station, there is a separate swipe of your passport for this data just after passport control (regrettably, the two checks cannot apparently be combined).

The difference with Eurotunnel is that not every vehicle has passports of the occupants checked before boarding a car-carrying shuttle, and therefore drivers are expected to supply full details of everyone travelling with them before departure in order for the UK government to keep track.

Every day our travel correspondent Simon Calder tackles a reader’s question. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder