Why did Turkish Airlines demand my resident permit for UAE during a transfer?

Question

I recently travelled to Europe. On return from Paris I had a layover at Istanbul. Before boarding the flight the Turkish Airlines staff asked for my resident permit for UAE. I told him we didn't have stickers on passport anymore, it's all digital and handed him the hard copy of the pdf I had on my phone. He took a picture of it and let me board the flight. This has never happened before. Is this normal? Have I been flagged?

Answer 1

Assuming you were returning to the UAE, which I don't think you have mentioned explicitly, it's entirely normal. Airlines generally have to establish that passengers have proper documents to enter their destination; if the airline can't show that they made a good faith effort to do so, they face a fine that is (in the countries I'm aware of) somewhere around USD 5000, give or take a thousand or two.

If this is the first trip you've made without a sticker in your passport, that would explain why this is the first time it's happened. On your previous flights to the UAE, the airline will have verified the sticker in your passport, even though you may not have noticed them doing so.

Taking the picture of the pdf on your phone allows the airline to demonstrate, if you are refused entry, that they had good reason to believe that you had the proper authorization to enter.

This in no way implies that you've been flagged. The only reason the airline would have to flag you is if you've done something wrong that would prompt them to keep you from flying in the future, which is clearly not the case here. It's also unlikely that the airline would act as the agent for a government flagging ' system -- if the government told the airline not to let you board, that's one thing, but that didn't happen. And the government doesn't need a picture of the pdf of your residence permit; they already know all about your residence permit.

Answer 2

It is a requirement for airlines to check that you have the required documentation to enter the destination country, and in some cases to transit via the transit countries, if any. If they don't and let a passenger get to a country for which they do not have the proper paperwork, they will usually have to transport the passenger back at their own expense, and can often incur a fine (possibly worth a few thousand €/$/£ per passenger they didn't correctly check!).

The documentation they will require varies based on your citizenship (i.e. the passport you present / has been recorded on your passenger record), the destination, and possibly the status you assert (visitor, resident...).

In some cases a passport is enough. In others they will look for a visa in the passport. In others still your details are sent to the destination country which will return a code stating whether you are allowed to board or not or need additional documentation. And probably quite a few others.

Airline agents (at check-in and/or at the gate) use databases like Timatic or Traveldoc to know the appropriate procedures and documents, but they usually don't check those databases for each and every passenger, only those which are outside of the standard cases they know by heart, especially for the current flight.

When you have a connection, agents are usually more aware of the rules to enter the immediate destination of the flight (your connection airport) rather than the rules for all possible final destinations. They will also most likely know by heart the rules for citizens of the origin and destination countries for that flight.

So on a flight from Paris to Istanbul, they will know the rules for French people travelling to Turkey (no visa/permit needed), those for Turkish people travelling to Turkey (no visa/permit needed either), possibly a few other rules for French people travelling to other destinations, or for a few other citizenships travelling to Turkey, and for all the rest, they will easily fall back to:

• If you are a citizen of the destination country, no visa/permit needed
• If they know off hand that you don't need a visa/permit for any other reason (because your citizenship entitles you to visa-free entry or visa on arrival), then nothing further needed.
• Otherwise, look for a visa in the passport, and if they don't find one, ask for a residence permit: that will probably cover the majority of cases. If you tell them otherwise they can they look up Timatic or Traveldoc for details of what is or isn't acceptable/required.

Remember that there are tens of thousands of combinations of citizenships and destination countries, and for each of those, various cases like residence permits, visas, visas on arrival, eVisas, etc, so if they want to board a few hundred passengers in any reasonable time, they will try to optimize their time.

In many cases the IT system will help them, just by presenting your passport or your boarding pass the system will tell them what to ask for (or not). In other cases they rely on their memory for the "standard" cases and manual lookups for the rest.

So nothing unusual at all here, just business as usual.

And no, there's no reason to think you have been "flagged" here either.

Answer 3

We have had this happen in Istanbul as well, and at least once in another airport. My theory is that this is mostly based on nationality/passport and destination country. But in our Istanbul case slightly unusual visa documentation probably also played a role (they directly asked about it).