Originally Posted by
Uplinker
How does anyone except you, know that you are an innocent tourist going on holiday ? A criminal is very likely to hide what they are doing and will probably travel from A to B to C to D, via holiday destinations to hide their intentions, instead of going A to D directly.
Also, criminals or people of interest leaving a country might have an all ports bulletin issued by the police, so passports have to be checked for this.
As far as checking computerised tickets, a criminal can probably fake their personal details on these, so the passport must be checked to confirm identity. (Passports can also be faked of course, but it's much harder to do, I would imagine - and hope !).
So a few points here.
How do they know someone is going on holiday? Well 99.9% of people are fine. Someone going from Germany and Spain is not checked at all, why does the rule need to be different (I’m not talking about customs here, but in effect, they also use a risk based approach). I’m talking about doing such immigration at check in and if there’s a case to be answered, people are highlighted before they leave the country or go in the air.
During Covid, a lot of countries delegated “vaccine passports” and testing checks to the airlines at check in.
As for genuine documents, I’m not saying people shouldn’t need passports at all, but the checks are done earlier in the process and done once or twice. I had a situation last year where my passport was probably checked 5 times before boarding and boarding pass stamped 3 times.