My fake ticket: Bogota->Frankfurt

In many regards traveling the world has become so much easier these days. But there is one thing that can cause the world traveler of today some headache: The onward travel requirements that many countries have implemented. What’s an onward travel requirement? Well, you are only allowed to enter a country when you have proof that you will leave this country. This is a major inconvenience when you are backpacking across a continent. Often you don’t know how long you will want to stay in a country. If it’s nice you stay longer and otherwise you move on sooner. I mostly travel by bus anyway and often these tickets can not be bought online.
So, what to do?

When discussing this problem with the owner of my hotel in Nicaragua he told me that he usually gets fake bus tickets that are valid for a year. But then he had a great suggestion. He said: You are a graphic designer. Why don’t you create your own fake ticket in Photoshop? Of course, that’s it!

So, I took the PDF of an old ticket, opened it in Illustrator and replaced the data. One has to be careful though as to replace all the data properly. In the ticket on the right (here is the full PDF: Fake Flight ticket: Bogota -> Frankfurt) I misspelled the name of the airport. It’s ‘El Dorado’ not ‘El Dorade’. Hmm, I must have been thinking of one of Anja’s fish recipies…

By now I can report two successful border crossings with my fake flight tickets. The first one went really well. I was a bit nervous though. The second one was a little more complicated. The lady at the check in counter that asked me if I had a ticket for onward travel turned out to take her job very seriously. Seeing the ticket was not enough for her. She decided to access the flight database and enter my confirmation code. Surprisingly for her (but not me) she couldn’t find that flight in there. At this point I was sweating quite a bit but tried to pretend that I had no clue what could possibly be wrong… The woman didn’t speak much English, that might have been what saved me. After some time she gave up and let me check in.
I am considering to try my luck with fake bus tickets next time…

Update: For anyone wanting to fake his own ticket, perhaps this Adobe Illustrator file of my fake ticket might come handy…