It’s not that easy…

There are several steps to take before going to the airport. First, we booked (and paid for) our day 2 and day 8 tests about two weeks ago. Doing that provides the essential booking reference number which is needed for the Passenger Locator form. The Passenger Locator form cannot be completed before 48 hours prior to the flight. That form also requires our UK quarantine address, flight details (including seat number!) etc. Second, we took a COVID test on Tuesday morning (no earlier than 72 hours prior to departure). We got the results Wednesday at noon, negative of course. Third, ‘normal’ passport information is provided to the airline. Now we made a decision to use our UK passports in all of these steps which leads to the first complication; we could not check in online prior to going to the airport because the systems apparently assume that anyone travelling on a UK passport must by definition have a green card or US visa. We have neither because we are US citizens. The other pain is that the ‘VeriFLY’ app used by British Airways and American Airlines should allow the processing of these documents to go a lot smoother as one is simply meant to upload them to the app and receive a positive green tick thingy that helps at check in time. For Tim it worked, after a fashion; the COVID test result had to be uploaded twice. For Jeri it never worked because despite uploading the documents, VeriFLY told us the status remains ‘pending’ due to the current high demand. Still after 18 hours it remains pending, thus making the whole point of VeriFLY moot because we will have to provide our paper documents to the airline at check-in anyway. You’d have thought that VeriFLY and the airlines would have got this worked out by now. Grrrr…

AIRPORT UPDATE; got to LAX more than four hours before our 6.45pm flight just in case there were complications. As we were speaking to the desk agent we explained that Tim had a positive VeriFLY pre-approval but that Jeri’s was still pending, so we gave him her paper documents. At that very moment, Jeri’s VeriFLY app popped up with a positive result and so the agent dropped the papers and gleefully accepted her VeriFLY result. So after a few minutes we were through and heading for the security gates. Wow! It seems we will definitely be flying to the UK. Watch this space to hear what happens when we arrived….