Who Owns Your Passport Expiry Date?

I should have been flying home from Nevis right about now. My 11-year-old son and I were supposed to spend five days at the Nevis Mango Festival, a leisure trip, just the two of us, the first time ever both of us would have done a dad-son solo trip. 

Instead, I am writing this column because the night before departure, during online check-in, I discovered that his U.S. passport had expired 10 days prior to our flight. No warning from the airline, no alert from the booking platform, no flag at any point between purchasing the tickets and trying to use them. The trip was cancelled. The memories we were supposed to make never happened.

Several people I told responded with the same knowing nod. It happened to them too. Once it happens, you never let it happen again. They described it like a rite of passage. But a rite of passage implies the system is working as designed, and that the missed trip is the lesson, that the destruction of plans is how you learn the