Family cancel £1,800 Canary Island holiday due to passport wait

A family was forced to cancel a £1,800 Canary Island holiday because a passport took too long to be processed.

Many across the UK have reported that getting a new passport can take up to months of waiting. According to gov.uk, standard waiting times for an online application should take between five to six weeks for the week ending March 20.

Despite this, a tweet from the Passport Office on Monday, April 4 said: "Is your passport due to expire? You'll need to allow up to 10 weeks to process your passport application when applying from the UK." One man, in particular, Scott, noted how he and his wife had sent off five passports for renewal with the hopes of going abroad in January to Fuerteventura.

Read more: Family devastated as they miss Ryanair flight for £1,500 holiday after being left stranded in Manchester Airport queues

By early December, they had received four of the five passports back. So a family holiday was booked for their six children's Christmas presents. They described being "excited" to go on their first abroad holiday in three years - as during the pandemic they face six cancellations.

But, panic began to creep in when the fifth passport still had not arrived. Scott told the Liverpool Echo : "Around mid-December, they said there was a discrepancy against our son's passport, Robert, because his father's middle name was not on the passport application. It's not the first time it had been renewed but I asked why we weren't notified so it could've been sorted."

After a few days Scott was told by the office that they had not received the details with recorded delivery - he tried again a week later and was once again told the same thing. After the back and forth they were informed the application had been