A Guide To Getting A New Passport Abroad When Your Pages Are Full: UK
As travellers we know that there can always be problems with your passport when abroad. Filling up your passport with stamps and having no pages left is a privileged problem. But, a problem nonetheless. Especially when you are in the middle of a trip. This happened to me during a 9 month trip around Asia and left me needing extra passport pages.
Unable to find much information on the internet in regards to how to get a new UK passport whilst abroad I set out on my mission to get one in Japan without me having to fly back to the UK.
Read on for our guide on getting a UK passport application abroad.
New passport checklist:
- Your old passport
- A digital photo of yourself
- Somewhere to print/ scan
- Proof of stay for 4 weeks
It can happen to the best of us, no matter how organised you are something will always not go exactly to plan. For me, Reanna, that was my passport. I planned a 9 month trip around Asia, knowing that I would, probably need to order a new passport whilst away. The how, I wasn’t so sure of.
Having been away for 4 months and crossing quite a few borders – one of them being Borneo to Brunei by land – 12 stamps later (12!!) and i’d completed my trip to the tiny, unique country with considerably less visa pages. I was now down to 3 full pages, after begging the guards to leave these pages clear at every checkpoint, and with my next two places on my list being Japan and then China (where they require at least 2 full consecutive blank pages) I decided Japan would be the place I would order my new passport.
As soon as I arrived I immediately located the nearest Post Office and went online to Gov.uk and answered the necessary questions – my DOB, if I had had a UK passport before etc. It all seemed fairly straight forward and for once – the process actually is. You are able to take your photo on your phone to use as your new passport photo, keeping the cost down and saving you locating a photo booth, just ensure you have a plain background and some decent lighting, or if you would prefer a more ‘professional’ photo you can find a photo booth and locate the unique number found on the back of the photo and enter this online – I’m not sure how many of these photo booths can be found abroad but it’s worth having a look. The online service will tell you if your photo doesn’t match their automated checks as you upload it, just ensure your photo is between 50kb and 10mb and is in jpeg format.
The cost of your new standard passport is £75.50 plus postage.
Once this is all done it is time to send your passport off. I took a photo of my old passport before sending it so that I had proof of my citizenship if anything where to happen to it. In my non-existent Japanese and the helpful post officers limited English we managed to navigate that I wanted to send my passport back to England, tracked. I filled out the forms to stick on the envelope and off it went.
Once this was done, here came the more complicated part. The address which you include on your application and country is the address which you want your passport to be posted to. You must live at this address OR have a very valid reason and proof of why you want it sent to a different address. As a traveller I naturally didn’t have a fixed address in Japan so this became an issue. After a few emails back and forth I received an email from the Belfast overseas GOV team with a letter attached, this letter stated that if I wanted my passport posted to an address which wasn’t my usual address I must complete a signed declaration with the reason for this, this could include it being a second/ family home (with proof), a tenancy agreement for this address, a letter from your Doctor confirming I am known to them at that address or a letter from a company saying I am known to them at that address.
Once again, none of these reasons applied.
After days of trying to contact the embassy to no avail I finally got through to a very helpful man on their live chat who said if I had proof of me staying at an address over the whole time period it would take for my passport to be posted back to me this could be my proof. I asked him to email me the confirmation of this so that I had proof of this conversation and then proceeded.
As the passport can take can take up to 4 weeks to be sent back I immediately booked myself into a hostel for the next 4 weeks in Tokyo – ensuring it had free cancellation. I then printed off my signed declaration in the nearest 7 Eleven (it has to be physically signed, not electronically) scanned this back in and emailed it over alongside my booking confirmation – something else I had also confirmed on live chat as physically posting the document would have taken the whole process even longer.
I then cancelled my booking, knowing I wouldn’t need to be there for the full 4 weeks and after a few more days out exploring headed back to Tokyo on a coach. Next, I booked myself into the same hostel for 1 week with the knowledge I could extend if my passport didn’t come within this time frame, upon arrival I informed the staff that I would be having a parcel delivered to this address and could they accept it for me.
Thankfully, it didn’t need to be signed for by the person who it is for, otherwise it would have been a very boring week sat in a hostel in Tokyo.
Luckily, after only 6 short days my passport arrived! And on the 7th my old passport was sent back to me. (Both have to be sent to you at the same address).
I’ve never been so happy to see those little booklets as I was then.
All in all, my passport cost me £120 (I ordered one with additional pages to prolong doing this again) and took me around 5 weeks from applying to receiving it.
