Your passport is the one thing you can't replace abroad

“Living in the EU, it can feel like you don't need one. Then again, I never know exactly where my passport is. But when you head to the UK or anywhere outside the EU and you need your passport… I'm really glad I have this.”

Andrus Kaalep, founder of PureNomadFlow, on AirPass

You can replace almost anything on the road. A lost charger costs an hour in a shop. A lost card is blocked in a minute from your phone. A lost passport, outside your own country, can stop the whole journey.

What happens when a passport is lost abroad

The steps are the same almost everywhere:

1. Report it to the local police. You will usually need the police report for a new travel document and for your travel insurance.
2. Contact your embassy or consulate. They check who you are and issue an emergency travel document.
3. Travel home on that document. An emergency travel document is not a new passport. It is made for one journey, usually straight home, and it is valid only for a short time.

For EU citizens there is now a common format. Since 9 December 2025, EU countries issue the EU Emergency Travel Document to citizens whose passport has been lost, stolen or destroyed. If your own country has no embassy or consulate where you are, any other EU country's embassy there can issue it. It is valid for a single journey to your home country or country of residence, and normally for no more than 15 days.

In practice that means queues, forms and appointments, a missed flight or two, and the rest of your trip on hold. You do not continue to your next country with it. You go home.

Why EU travellers lose track of their passport

Inside the EU and the Schengen area, an ID card is enough for EU citizens, so the passport stays in a drawer for months. Then comes a trip to the UK, which most EU citizens can no longer enter with an ID card, or to Asia or the Americas, and the passport has to come out again. That is exactly when it goes missing: in the wrong drawer at home, in a jacket pocket, in the seat pocket of a plane, at a hotel reception.

How to make it hard to lose

• Give it one fixed place in your bag, every time, and check it at the same moments: before you leave, after security, before you get off a plane.
• Keep a photo and a copy of the photo page somewhere safe in the cloud. It speeds up the embassy part considerably.
• Make it findable. AirPass is a passport wallet with Apple Find My built in. You see where your passport was last seen on your iPhone, and when it is somewhere close, as Andrus puts it, “it even plays a sound”. It holds your passport, ID, cards and boarding passes, runs 5 to 6 months on a charge and charges wirelessly over MagSafe.

Nothing makes a lost passport painless. But knowing where it is, before you notice it is gone, is the cheapest travel insurance you can buy.

Source on the EU Emergency Travel Document: European External Action Service and European Commission, consular protection pages.