Oops of the Year: Motel Shredded 40 Passports

Looking back over the year, here's a story about a big, but innocent "OOOPS" mistake. In February 2023, a hotel worker cleaning up accidentally disposed of over 40 passports from school children visiting from the U.K. Here's the story.

 

Schoolchildren stranded on US ski trip after hotel ‘shredded 44 passports’ by mistake

(Report Taken in part from: Lucy Skoulding, The UK Independent, February 28, 2023)

Children from a UK school were stranded in the U.S. after a ski trip because their hotel accidentally shredded their passports in February 2023.

Pupils at Barr Beacon School, in Walsall, United Kingdom, were meant to fly home from Boston on Feb 25th after their skiing holiday but they missed their flight back after the mistake.

Teachers couldn’t believe it when the Kancamagus Lodge Hotel in New Hampshire where the group had been staying said they had accidentally destroyed 44 passports.

A management team member at  the Lodge  who “was cleaning and organizing the back office” accidentally placed a box of passports in “our private, secure, on-site dumpster,” according to a Facebook post.

The group was forced to go to the British Embassy in New York to obtain emergency travel documents, delaying their journey home by four days.

No one can fly out of the U.S. without a passport and it costs upwards of £150 for the British Embassy to issue an emergency travel document.