"Nightmare" for traveller as Sweden refuses Jersey vaccine passport

Tuesday 19 October 2021

A man told at the last minute he would not be allowed into Sweden because they were not accepting Jersey vaccine certificates has spoken out about his “nightmare” experience.

Sunil Sharma said that he was only informed 30 minutes before he was due to board his flight that Sweden was likely to be only accepting NHS passports, despite having been advised otherwise the day prior.

Mr Sharma had booked flights for 13 October to Stockholm to see his step-father, as well as to visit his mother’s grave for the first time in two years.

He had booked these flights following 9 October, when Sweden had changed its rules so that they were allowing people from the UK through as long as they had been vaccine certified, active from 11 October.

Pictured: Mr Sharma was told at Heathrow he would need more documentation, which he said he had not been prepared for either when on the phone with BA, or when talking to Jersey's Swedish Consulate.

Following this change, Mr Sharma’s step-father went to the Swedish Consulate to confirm if it would be possible for Mr Sharma to fly over, and he was told it was. 

Mr Sharma also looked at the BA website, which said “most travellers from Jersey are not allowed to enter Sweden yet”. With the recent rule change, however, he assumed this was not updated, but wanted to double-check - indeed, the site still reads "most travellers from the United Kingdom are not allowed to enter Sweden yet" still, despite the latest change.

With this in mind, he contacted the Swedish consulate in Jersey, who told him that “Jersey comes within the common zone for travel so they couldn’t see any problem.”

However, he was still conscious of getting the restrictions right, so on the day before he went to the British Airways travel agency in town, who said as agents they could not give advice, but gave him a number to call to speak to BA.

He said that after two hours, he got through, and was told, “...there shouldn’t be any problem at all for me to travel.”

However, on the date of his flight, he found himself being asked for something he had not been advised of.

“They said they wanted some sort of confirmation that my step-father is my step father,” he said - in response to this, he was able to get his step father to send him an email he could show if he was stopped, which confirmed their relationship, and gave an ID number.

There is a note on the Swedish Government's website that one of the exemptions is if an individual can prove they are a family member, but there is no mention that this would be needed in addition to a vaccine passport on the UK Government's site or in the Swedish Government's announcement that the rules had changed.

With this evidence, British Airways staff in Jersey were happy, and Mr Sharma flew into Heathrow.

However, come 16:30, half-an-hour before his flight to Stockholm was scheduled to board, he opened his phone to find an e-mail from Jersey’s Swedish Consulate delivering even more unexpected news. 

“Yesterday [the Swedish Embassy in London] advised that one problem might be the vaccination pass from Jersey. It is NHS vaccinations that are valid for travel to Sweden,” it read.

“They sent an e-mail to Swedish Border Force yesterday and they have just received a very clear message that they will not accept Jersey vaccination certificates as they do not recognise the Channel Islands as being part of the UK and therefore you will not be able to travel. 

"They do not know when this will change.”

Pictured: Mr Sharma had his Jersey covid vaccine passport, but there was still doubt cast on whether he could enter the country as it was not NHS recognised.

He said he then approached the British Airways desk at Heathrow to ask about this. According to Mr Sharma, they then showed little interest in the vaccine certificate, but instead wanted proof that his step-father was his step-father.

“I spoke to BA the day before - if they’d have mentioned that, I’d have got my mum’s marriage certificate… but I wasn’t informed of that until the last minute, so it just got greyer and greyer, to be honest,” he said.

Following both of these issues, and BA staff still not being sure if he would be allowed in even having shown them his mother’s death certificate, Mr Sharma decided he would not risk flying out to Stockholm, should he be pulled up and refused at border control.

He said once he had decided this, the staff at Heathrow began trying to “offload” him from the departure area, not offering a return flight back to Jersey.

Eventually, after telling them he was “not moving from here until I get some sort of peace of mind”, BA relented and offered him flights back the following day, with Mr Sharma paying for his own hotel for the overnight stay. 

He said that he has also not been able to reclaim his flight from Heathrow to Stockholm, as the flight had already departed once he tried to make the claim.

Speaking about the experience as a whole, he said it would hopefully “get whoever needs to be on the same page so it doesn’t happen to anyone else", particularly elderly travellers.

 “[My step-father is] 72, he’s alone there. I just wanted to spend six days of valuable time with him and obviously visit my mother’s grave, and I wasn’t able to do that.”

He added: “I did everything I needed to do, I got all the paperwork they required, so for me it was a living nightmare.” 

A spokesperson for British Airways said they would not comment on this specific situation, but said that “British Airways always advises customers to check the local travel restrictions to where they’re travelling to.”  

The Jersey Swedish Consulate has been contacted comment, and Express is yet to receive a response.

Express has also contacted the Government to ask what, if anything, is being done to ensure Sweden accepts local vaccine passports.