Keep those flight tickets

When you get so much free spaces on emails, spare some space for those old emailed flight tickets in your inbox. You never know when it will come in handy.

Take for instance, my aunt's case. She has travelled to UK a few times to meet her son who lives there. And then one day, she lost her passport in India. She applied for a new passport and got it and applied for a new visa for seeing her son in UK. The UK visa team rejected her application on the basis that they were not sure whether she returned back to India during the vaildity of the visa term or stayed back as an illegal immigrant after the proposed visa duration stay as the new passport lacked the immigration check seal of departure from UK. Although the UK's immigration department has details of my aunt's checking out of UK, the country's system puts the onus on the foreigner to prove that they left the country in time and didnt violate any rules. This is one of the ways the government tries to permanently avoid other people coming into their country.

To top this, the British Airliner says they keep information of passengers for only three months and since the travel was beyond that period, they cant give them a copy of the ticket or the confirmation of travel. I wonder how these same airlines and airports would have all the required information and recorded video of the passengers if the enquiring people were some anti-terrorist detectives.

The saving grace was that my aunt's son had a email copy of the ticket lying somewhere in his inbox which he found out.

Moral of the stroy: Despite feeling sometimes that an email/document(air tickets, bank accoubnt closing letter, bank account statements after closing a bank account) is a piece of junk i have to live with, one may never know when it will be a life saviour and where.