My husband and I are UK citizens; I have a blue UK passport, and my husband has a red one. We are travelling on Brussels Airlines and will have a three-hour transit, then we will travel onwards to Ghana on the same airline. Do we need to obtain any visas to make this trip?
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2 Answers
The color of the passport is not relevant.
UK passport holders do not need a visa to visit the Schengen area for up to 90 days in any 180-day period, so unless you have exceeded this limit you will have no trouble with the transit in Brussels.
You will both need a visa to visit Ghana. See https://www.ghanahighcommissionuk.com/ for details. After you clear the pop-up window with the list of fees, you'll see a page that includes a link to the visa application.
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I'm not sure the colour is not relevant. So to the questioner: check the expiration data of the passport and the issuing data (passport older then 10 years may not be considered valid) Commented Jul 5 at 7:20
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3@GiacomoCatenazzi the color is entirely irrelevant. How could it be relevant? Even your advice shows that the passport's expiration date is relevant, not its color. Sometimes people use color as a proxy for the passport's type, because countries tend to use different colors for diplomatic, service, official, temporary, emergency, etc., passports. But there the true distinction is in the type, not the color, and the red and blue UK passports are both of the same type, namely normal passports. They have the same legal status and effect.– phoogCommented Jul 5 at 9:14
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Looking in Wikipedia, colour is not like in Sweden: you can choose, but a way to identify series. The most red passport was a machine readable one (non biometric), and then one darker red biometric, the series A (now we are in series C), so read as "old passport" (or maybe "non-biometric passport" (which it is not more valid because it was last issued near 20 years ago -- Linguistically we use (Switzerland) the colour of driving license to say if it is the old one (blue) or the new one (pink), on how to interpret the categories. Commented Jul 5 at 12:06
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I thought that the colour was due to whether it was issued pre or post Brexit. My wife's burgundy one looks like an EU passport and my blue one does not. Of course, neither is really an EU passport. So, colour is relevant in a way: burgundy means old and more like to be expired. Blue means new and, for the next few years, unlikely to be expired. Unless, it is really ancient and dates from before the UK adopted the EU style. I have one of these and I also have a similarly old green Irish one. However, the colour is just a suggestion: check the expiration date.– badjohnCommented Jul 5 at 15:12
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2@badjohn "of course, neither really is an EU passport": that is why the color is not relevant. Yes, the color is a rough guide to the expiration date of the document, but not much else. I have a green US passport somewhere that is definitely expired. The main reason I mentioned the lack of relevance in the color is that (for a while at least) there seems to have been s common misconception that the red passport continued to confer EU rights on those bearing it simply because it was red and said "European Union" on it. As you note, that isn't the case.– phoogCommented Jul 5 at 15:23
As British citizens you don’t need a visa to transit Brussels.
You do need a visa to visit Ghana, and your passport must have an expiry date at least 6 months after the date you arrive.
