carcajou

George Lombard runs a consultancy and can be found through an Internet search.

In the future your relative should consider purchasing visa evidence (you can buy the sticker that goes into the passport). Home Affairs insists it isn't necessary, but you never know when someone's computer might fail. We, also, always travel with our visa grant letter.

Thankfully we have never had this happen, though two or three times we were questioned intently about our visa and there seemed to be a lot of typing and searching by the ticket agent.

Good luck.

Pollyana

You can no longer get passport stickers, they were discontinued a couple of years back.

VEVO is the source to check. And the airline should have followed it up, as Rammygirl said above - a phone call would have told them whether a RRV was needed or whether the system just has a fault.
A poster here for many years, Bermudashorts, used to report that her husband always had problems as the systemm for some reason refused to accept his perfectly valid visa. Often had check-in issues (from memory!)

Pollyana

If he still has the grant email it should have details of 'Must enter Australia before XXXX'. The date will be five years after the date the visa was GRANTED. If that date has passed, he needs a RRV.

JustAsking2

Thanks very much everybody (sorry, on phone and cannot go back to see everybody's names again!)

I finally just managed to get through to the airline. They said they have double checked and they have confirmed that they reason why he was denied boarding is that his visa has expired and he needs to apply for a different one. So I guess it's down the route of applying for a re-entry visa now.

I've been flying blind here so not sure of the details, but thanks again for all your help. I'll tell him to check out the updates to this thread, on the off chance any of your experiences chimes in with him and there could actually have been a mistake, you never know.

Pollyana

It does sound like he will need to get a RRV. The visa itself will be fine, he still has his permanent residency. He ust needs the RRV in order to enter Aus.

If his visa was granted originally before 4th March 2013 (or 2nd/3rd whichever day he tried to board) , then thats the answer. His travel rights will have expired. And in answer to an earlier comment - they won't have queried it on the way out because he didn't need a valid visa to leave, only to return.

carcajou

OP, please read what Pollyanna wrote very carefully. It is vitally important that you know what the visa grant date is. That is separate and different from the date when your relative moved to Australia, and your relative needs to understand that as well.

I would also say go a step further and sight the information yourself, ask for him to forward you the e-mail with the visa grant notice in it, or look at it in VEVO, because lines are getting crossed up somewhere in this case.

If it is not yet five years from when the visa grant date was - that would be from 4 March 2013 or later - then do not apply for a RRV, call one of the migration agents, and call Home Affairs as the airline has stuffed up massively (and no guarantee they won't do so again with an RRV). As another poster pointed out, applying for an RRV at that stage, when the original travel rights are still valid, potentially for several more years, could create problems.

If it has been five years from the visa grant date - the airline is correct and your relative needs an RRV. In that case your relative needs to do a lot of study to make sure he understands his visa conditions including requirements for citizenship a few years down the track.

Good luck and do update us.

bcworld

I can't really imagine a scenario where this is the airline's fault. From their perspective, they will swipe the passport and then wait for a go / no go result to come back from the system. So I would've thought either the visa has expired or immigration is returning that result for some erroneous reason. And it certainly wouldn't be the case that normally the passenger would be allowed to board and sort it out once in Australia...the airline would be penalised for that whenever the passenger was rejected.

Pollyana

Exactly, They can't fly and sort it out here, no airline would do that.
I suspect that if check-in had phoned Immigration it would all have been sorted by now, but.... and if the pax didn't know that was an option
Be interested to hear the outcome.

rammygirl

Do you know the actual visa they hold? Usually a number like 189 or 190. Again that will be on the visa grant notice or VEVO.

Pollyana

Good point...lets hope its PR.......