Fee

There’s a simple passport and booking mistake that could see holidaymakers pay up to an extra £160 per passenger, just to correct it, or be denied boarding at the airport

An easy passport mistake could see holidaymakers denied boarding at the airport or charged a fee.

Jetting off abroad is always exciting, but there are a few key pre-planning checks everyone should make to ensure a smooth, safe journey. From ensuring the passport is in date, securing valid travel insurance, checking any travel advice on the Foreign Office website, to understanding the country’s entry requirements and the European Union’s (EU) new Entry/Exit System (EES).

Then comes the fun part: booking a luxurious hotel or resort, planning a desirable itinerary, finding the best flights, and heading to the airport. Yet, amid the anticipation, there’s a simple mistake with passports and flight bookings that could cause major disruption to anyone’s travel plans, and it’s easily avoidable.

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Gavin Lapidus, Company Director at eShores, a UK-based travel agent, warned that a traveller’s name on a passport must match the name on their booking. This can be an issue for shortened or nicknames, name changes, including for those who are married, and any spelling mistakes.

If the name on their booking does not match the passport, holidaymakers could “be denied boarding, experience delays at security or check‑in, or be charged a fee to correct the name”, Gavin exclusively told the Mirror. “Airline policies vary, so it’s important to triple‑check name details before booking.”

The travel expert further advised: “Travellers should never use shortened names, nicknames, or aliases when booking flights. For example, booking under ‘Bob’ instead of ‘Robert’ can result in being denied boarding if it doesn’t match the passport exactly. Always use your full legal name as it appears on your passport to avoid delays or additional fees.”

Gavin also warned about the cost of correcting a spelling mistake. “Minor spelling errors can sometimes be corrected, often for a fee. However, full name changes are usually not allowed,” he explained.

“If you spot an error, contact your airline as soon as possible, as acting quickly improves your chances of having it fixed. Be prepared to show valid identification and expect potential charges.”

For easyJet passengers, they can amend their title or correct spelling mistakes via the airline’s website or mobile app free of charge. However, if anyone needs to change the name on the flight booking, easyJet will charge £60 per passenger per flight when amended online, or £65 with the customer service team.

Meanwhile, Ryanair will charge £115 per passenger for a name change when made online, or £160 through an agent. For Jet2, if a name change is made 15 days before the departure date, it will cost £50, but 14 days or less will set a passenger back £150.

For Brits who are married but have not yet changed their maiden name on their passport, Gavin further advised: “If a traveller has recently married, the name on the booking must still match the name shown on the passport. There is no legal obligation to change your surname immediately after marriage.

“If your passport is still in your maiden name, you can continue to travel using it until it expires, as long as your flight booking is made in the same name. You can update your passport at any time using your marriage certificate.”

Do you have a travel story to share? Email webtravel@reachplc.com

British travellers planning trips abroad must check their passports at least three weeks before departure

Brits heading abroad should carefully check their passports at least three weeks before they travel. Missing certain critical problems could land you with a £239 bill.

Travellers must make sure their passports are valid and in good condition before they set foot on a plane. Any problems could see you turned away at the gate.

To sort this out, your passport will need to be replaced straight away, and putting this off could prove costly as standard passport renewals can take up to three weeks.

Following a price rise earlier this month, a standard passport will set you back £102. However, if you’ve left a passport problem until just days before your trip, you’ll be forced to shell out £239.50 for the one-day express service.

GOV.UK warns: “If your passport is damaged you must replace it. You may not be able to travel with it.”

The HM Passport Office will consider a passport damaged if:

You cannot read any of your details

• Any of the pages are torn, cut or missing
• There are holes, cuts or tears in the cover
• The cover is detaching
• There are stains on the pages (for example, ink or water damage)

Regarding your passport’s expiry date, the requirements will differ depending on where you’re headed. Some countries insist on at least six months remaining on your passport upon arrival, while others only require three.

For a full breakdown of passport requirements by country, visit the Government website here.

Applying for a passport online

To apply online, head to the Government website here. Key requirements include a digital photograph, a valid payment method (credit or debit card), and your existing passport if you’re renewing.

Furthermore, applicants must supply proof of their identity and citizenship. The application fee for adults stands at £102, while children’s passports are priced at £66.50.

For anyone requiring assistance with the online application, local Post Office branches provide support services. Their staff are able to:

• Take your digital photo
• Help with completing the online application

Be mindful that this service carries an extra charge.

Postal applications

Paper passport applications are available from your local Post Office. Keep in mind that postal applications generally take longer to process than online ones.

They’re also more expensive than online applications, setting you back £115.50. You’ll be required to submit a completed application form alongside your supporting documents, two photographs, and the relevant fee.

Post Office staff can assist in making sure your form is properly completed – though you’ll need to supply your own photos. Payment can be made using cash, debit or credit cards.

Fast-track applications

If the standard three-week processing period is cutting it too close with your holiday plans, several quicker options are available for securing a passport. According to the Government website: “You can pay to get a passport urgently if you think the standard service will take too long.”

To take advantage of these fast-track services, you’ll need to secure an appointment at a passport office:

• The same-day premium service carries a charge of £239.50 (or £253.50 for the 54-page frequent traveller passport)
• The one-week express service costs £192 for an adult passport (or £206 for the 54-page frequent traveller passport), and £156.50 for a child’s passport (or £170.50 for the 54-page version)

For further information, visit the Government website here.

Check today or face paying a much higher price.

Brits who are planning to head abroad have been urged to make one vital passport check today. Many of us are looking forward to summer holidays and sightseeing trips, yet one mistake could prove costly.

When booking holidays, you might forget to check when your passport expires. Different countries have their own rules on passport validity, with some requiring it to be valid for your entire trip while others for even longer.

To travel to Europe and Schengen countries, passports must be less than 10 years old before your departure date and valid for at least three months after your planned return date.

If your passport doesn’t meet these requirements, you’ll need to renew it. However, on Wednesday, April 8, the prices are set to increase.

A new passport application online currently costs £94.50 for an adult standard 34-page passport and a standard child passport costs £61.50.

The fee for a standard online application will then be £102 for adults and £66.50 for children.

Applications made by post are currently £107 for an adult and £74 for a child. Yet, as of tomorrow, these will go up to £115.50 and £80 respectively.

Other passport fees are set to increase this week. If you need a passport quickly, the fee for a premium one day service made within the UK will rise from £222 to £239.50.

If you apply for a UK passport overseas, this will increase from £108 to £116.50 for adults and £70 to £75.50 for children. Overseas standard paper applications will increase from £120.50 to £130 for adults and £82.50 to £89 for children.

The Home Office said of the increase: “The new fees will help the Home Office to continue to move towards a system that meets its costs through those who use it, reducing reliance on funding from general taxation.

“The government does not make any profit from the cost of passport applications.

“The fees contribute to the cost of processing passport applications, consular support overseas, including for lost or stolen passports, and the cost of processing British citizens at UK borders.”

It said that in 2025, 99.7% of standard passport applications from the UK were processed within three weeks when no further information was required.

If you are requiring a new passport and don’t want to pay the additional fees, it has been recommended to submit your application before the increase on Wednesday.

New passport prices

• Adult standard online application from within the UK – £102
• Child standard online application from within the UK – £66.50
• Adult standard postal application from within the UK – £115.50
• Child standard postal application from within the UK – £80
• Premium one day application from within the UK – £239.50
• Adult standard online application from outside the UK – £116.50
• Child standard online application from outside the UK – £75.50
• Adult standard paper application from outside the UK – £130
• Child standard paper application from outside the UK – £89

A UK tourist attraction may start charging visitors an entry fee for the first time.

The historic site has cited increasing financial pressures as the reason behind the potential move.

Worcester Cathedral has launched a consultation period to explore whether its annual 250,000 visitors could help with running costs.

The 1,300-year-old building, which is the resting place of historic figures such as King John and Prince Arthur Tudor, is the most visited attraction in Worcestershire.

According to the Worcester Cathedral website, the site is currently free to visit but there is a suggested donation of £7 for adult entry to the site.

Guided tours are also available, priced at around £8 per person, offering visitors additional information on the site’s history and architecture, as well as access to the tower.

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Despite these revenue streams and the site’s popularity, the cathedral confirmed that its “current financial position is not sustainable over time”.

Total expenditure for the cathedral was recorded as £4.06million for the 2024-2025 financial year, while the site’s gross income came to £3.08million, leaving a funding gap of roughly £1million.

To tackle this, the cathedral is currently considering a mandatory entry charge, which it said would contribute to costs such as energy bills and maintenance, as well as staffing.

Speaking on the potential fee, Dean Stephen Edwards emphasised the cathedral would always remain a place of worship first and foremost, reports the BBC.

He assured local church-goers that access for prayer, services, and pastoral support would not be affected under any potential changes.

“Through this consultation we explore how we can invite appropriately those who visit primarily for heritage and tourism to contribute fairly towards the cost of maintaining the cathedral and its activities,” he said.

He went on to explain that Worcester Cathedral, like “many historic institutions”, is experiencing a rise in running and maintenance costs.

“While careful financial management and support from our endowment have enabled us to balance budgets in recent years, this has reduced our reserves and increased our reliance on investment income.”

The Dean added that diversifying income streams would help the cathedral to “remain resilient and financially sustainable”.

Worcester Cathedral is currently asking for the public’s views on the proposed entry fee via an online survey, which will remain open until Friday, April 10.

The survey stated that “no decisions have been taken” and did not include a potential price for the entry fee.

Other tourist attractions, including Rome’s Trevi Fountain, have recently brought in entry fees for the first time.

A group of attorneys general are taking legal action to block Nexstar Media Group’s proposed $6.2-billion acquisition of Tegna’s TV stations, calling the deal bad for consumer cable bills and local journalism.

A lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Sacramento says the proposed deal by eight state law enforcers, including California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, claims the proposed deal will give Nexstar too much control of local TV stations, ultimately hurting consumers by diminishing the diversity of news sources in their markets.

Bonta said in a statement that the deal will cause “irreparable harm to local news and consumers who rely on their reporting as a critical source of information.” The plaintiffs also include state attorneys general in Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Oregon and Virginia.

The Irving, Texas-based Nexstar is currently the largest station owner in the U.S., with 164 outlets including KTLA in Los Angeles. If the merger with Tegna succeeds, Nexstar would have 265 TV stations reaching 80% of the U.S. and multiple outlets in a number of markets.

The suit also claims that the merger would give Nexstar too much leverage in negotiating fees from pay-TV providers that carry their stations. Higher fees paid to Nexstar would be passed along to consumers in their cable and satellite bills, the lawsuit asserts.

Most of Nexstar’s stations are affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, all of which carry NFL football, the highest-rated programming on TV by a wide margin. Disputes over carriage fees between station owners and pay-TV providers often result in blackouts and service interruptions to consumers.

DirecTV, which serves around 11 million pay-TV subscribers in the U.S., filed a similar lawsuit in the same court on Thursday, claiming the Nexstar deal will “irreparably drive up consumer costs, reduce local competition, shutter local newsrooms, and increase both the frequency and duration of blackouts of key local teams and network programming.”

A Nexstar representative did not respond to a request to comment.

President Trump has said he favors Nexstar’s proposed deal. But every major TV station owner believes consolidation in the TV station business is necessary to thrive going forward as they battle to compete with streaming video platforms that have eaten away at their audience share.

The companies say they are at a disadvantage in competing with tech companies by being limited to owning stations in 39% of the U.S., a cap that was set in 2003.

Nexstar recently cut veteran anchors and on-air reporters from its stations in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Further reductions in local TV newsrooms would occur if Nexstar succeeds in acquiring Tegna, which would likely mean consolidation of local newsrooms in which it owns more than one station.

Mukalla, Yemen – A reported decision to impose thousands of dollars in fees on shipping headed for Yemen has experts worried that the price of imported goods and food will increase in the war-torn country, as it starts to feel the economic impact of the United States and Israel’s conflict with Iran.

Local traders and officials have said that international shipping companies informed importers earlier this month of the imposition of new fees of about $3,000 on each container bound for Yemen, described as “war risk” fees. The surprise move prompted government officials to scramble to assess and address its potential repercussions.

Because Yemen imports nearly 90 percent of its food and other essential commodities, economists and humanitarian organisations warn that the rise in shipping and insurance costs could quickly translate into higher prices for fuel, food and other goods, further worsening an already dire humanitarian situation.

Mohsen al-Amri, transport minister in Yemen’s internationally-recognised government based in the southern city of Aden, said he had instructed that the fees not be paid by ships already docked at Yemeni ports or those bound for the country, insisting that the ports remain safe.

“Our ports are far from the areas of geopolitical tension in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, making the imposition of ‘risk’ fees on shipments to these relatively safe areas unjustified from both operational and security perspectives,” he said in a social media post last week.

Al Jazeera has reached out to shipping companies to confirm details of the fee, but has yet to receive responses.

For more than a decade, Yemen has been gripped by a bloody war between the Saudi-backed government, based in Aden, and the Iran-aligned Houthi movement, which controls the capital, Sanaa. The conflict has killed and wounded thousands of people and displaced millions, creating what the United Nations once described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Hostilities have significantly declined since April 2022, when the warring parties agreed to a temporary United Nations-brokered truce.

‘High-risk’

Abdulrab al-Khulaqui, deputy chairman of the Yemen Gulf of Aden Ports Corporation, said Yemeni ports have long been classified as high-risk, prompting shipping companies to impose war-risk surcharges. These can reach about $500 per each 20-foot container and $1,000 per each 40-foot container, on top of regular shipping costs.

Al-Khulaqui said that the $3,000 fee now being demanded was “very high and unusual”, but was justified by shipping companies because they regard Yemeni ports as unsafe, despite their distance from Iran.

Although the Houthis are allied to Iran and previously attacked shipping in the Red Sea following Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the Yemeni group has yet to intervene in the US-Israel-Iran conflict. Other Yemeni parties are also not involved, making Yemen one of the few regional countries yet to see any violence related to the fighting.

In addition to barring local traders from paying the new charges, the Yemeni government is considering other measures to pressure shipping companies to cancel the fees, including threatening to stop vessels belonging to those companies from docking at Yemeni ports. Authorities may also allow traders to contact exporters directly in countries of origin to negotiate any additional charges.

The new surcharges come as the United Nations has again sounded the alarm over Yemen’s worsening humanitarian situation, saying nearly 65.4 percent of the population – about 23.1 million people – will require urgent humanitarian assistance and protection services this year. This marks an increase of roughly 3.5 million people compared with 2025.

“Yemen continues to face an escalating food security crisis entering 2026,” the World Food Program said in its February Yemen Food Security Update, released on March 5. “January data revealed that 63 percent of households nationwide are struggling to meet their minimum food needs, including 36 percent facing severe food deprivation.”

Bypassing Yemen’s ports

In addition to rising insurance fees on shipments to Yemen, the war in Iran and potential disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz could cut vital supply routes from regional hub ports such as Jebel Ali in the United Arab Emirates.

Mustafa Nasr, head of the Studies and Economic Media Center, told Al Jazeera that shipping companies may begin seeking alternative hub ports to deliver goods to Yemen, which could increase costs and cause delays.

“The closure of Jebel Ali port would force shipping lines to seek alternative ports that may be farther away and involve significantly higher transportation costs,” he said.

Nabil Abdullah Bin Aifan, manager of the government-run Maritime Affairs Authority in Hadramout province and a maritime researcher, said most goods arriving at Mukalla port – the province’s main seaport – are transported on wooden dhows from Dubai.

He said that if disruptions occur in the Strait of Hormuz, traders may turn to alternative regional hub ports such as Salalah in Oman or Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

“Large ships come to Dubai to unload their containers, and traders then unload the goods from the containers and load them onto those primitive ships, which have no insurance,” Bin Aifan told Al Jazeera.

For now, wheat shipments from Ukraine and goods transported from China to Yemen may see price increases due to rising insurance costs, while products imported from Gulf countries could disappear from the market.

Shipping lines may also consider routing cargo through the Cape of Good Hope rather than the Gulf, Bin Aifan said.

“Even before the recent developments involving Iran, ports in our region were considered high risk. However, after the relative calm that followed the halt to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, confidence gradually returned and ships began sailing back to the region. Now, the war has brought the problem back again,” he said.

All of this means that Yemenis, already struggling with poverty and hunger after years of war, will likely have to pay more for imported food and goods.

Abdullah al-Hadad, an English teacher from the city of Taiz with 40 years of experience in the profession, said that his monthly salary – less than $80 – is already not enough to cover his basic needs. Meat and fish have become luxuries for his family, and he still owes nearly one million Yemeni riyals (about $670) to a local grocery shop.

To make ends meet, he works additional jobs as a taxi driver and in a grocery store, while his children also work after school to help support the family and pay for medication for his 10-year-old son, who has autism.

“What I suffer from as a government employee is the extremely low salary, which does not even cover basic necessities such as bread, tea, salt and sugar,” al-Hadad told Al Jazeera.

“Other foods that are essential for a healthy diet, like meat or fish, have become a distant dream.”

The outgoing Director General for the BBC, Tim Davie, has spoken out in the defence of the licence fee, which has risen to a huge £15 a month, making it more expensive than multiple streaming services

The BBC is in “crisis,” departing Director General Tim Davie has said. The broadcaster has been criticised for its planned increase to the licence fee, which will rise to £180, from April 1.The increase, required by the 2022 Licence Fee Settlement, will rise by £5.50 for the year. This means a standard colour TV licence will now cost each home £15 a month, more than a subscription to various streaming platforms.

Speaking on The Rest Is Entertainment podcast, Davie insisted that the BBC – and other institutions – are certainly in “crisis”. He says: “Trust is built and I’m semi-obsessed by this – trust is built by people absolutely believing that someone is acting in their interest and that they listen to them. And if you think about an old-school broadcaster, it broadcasts….

“I think there have been too many instances where institutions and the BBC is definitely not exempt from this – where, call it what you will, metropolitan, a certain lens on life.”

According to Davie, as long as the BBC is providing value, then there should be no problems about an increase in the licence fee.

“We’re at a consultation phase, but we have set out a very clear preference which is and I would do this to the point about restarting where we’re at – I think there is a model which says: look, if we can deliver value for every household and really work at that, then everyone contributes fairly, and I think that is a model that’s worth fighting for,” he says.

“I don’t see it as something potentially trapped in the past. I actually think it could be something exciting for the future – quite enlightened. You don’t have to go exactly where the market is going currently. You have to make markets, and I think we can do that.”

The BBC have been hit by serious allegations that one of their Panorama documentaries misled viewers by editing a speech by Donald Trump. The BBC’s director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness both resigned in November.

It had been alleged in a leaked internal BBC memo that those working on the Panorama programme edited two parts of the speech together so that Trump appeared to explicitly encourage the Capitol Hill riot back in 2021. Trump has since launched a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against the BBC, which is scheduled to go to trial in February 2027.

He did not explicitly reference any specific errors the BBC had made under his tenure but he said the world was in an age of “weaponisation”, where the broadcaster was under strict scrutiny over one thing – but not referencing all the good work they’ve done.

“We’ve made mistakes, sometimes serious mistakes, which we regret. But weaponisation is selectively taking one fact – it may be a fact, so you’re standing on a fact – but what you’re not standing on is any effort to be proportionate,” he says.

“You’re not saying, look, a thousand stories run, we’re running, and one didn’t get it right, or overall this is where there’s no balance of data. It’s literally just selecting a fact to make a case.”

*Watch or listen to The Rest Is Entertainment however you get your podcasts.

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