41 students stranded in US after hotel shreds passports of school group

Pupils were told passports left in the care of the hotel were shredded. Photo / Ethan Wilkinson, Unsplash

A group of pupils from the UK have been stuck overseas on a school ski trip after their accommodation shredded the passports left in their care.

42 students from the Barr Beacon School were staying at a ski lodge in Lincoln, New Hampshire. When the group, due to return home on Saturday, went to collect their passports left in the care of the Kancamagus Lodge, the hotel told them that the documents had been destroyed.

The school’s headmistress Katie Hibbs told the BBC that 41 of the 42 passports had been shredded and they were unable to travel home from America.

“Unfortunately, the hotel managed to destroy the passports in their care, which has led to all those affected having to apply for emergency travel documents,” Hibbs told The Telegraph.

It’s not clear why the travel documents were destroyed.

The pupils aged between 13 to 15 were now applying for emergency travel documents, which required them to travel to the British Consulate in New York.

The pupils appear to be making the most of the impromptu embassy run; on Monday, the school’s social media shared a photo of the group on an open-top tour bus in the city. The school said the pupils were “seeing lots of New York.”

Parents were furious at the news and could not understand why the documents had been shredded or left with the hotel.

Speaking to the Express one of the pupils’ parents said they had been hit by passport processing delays, so to be told the document had been destroyed was disappointing.

“We had to wait weeks to get a passport in the first place. I will be asking the hotel or school to pay for a replacement,” they said.

Having departed for the trip on February 18, the group were rescheduled to travel back to the UK on Wednesday.