Photo:
Anxious travellers have been forced to either change their international flights or fork out hundreds of dollars extra for urgent passports as a system upgrade causes delays of up to eight weeks.
The Department of Internal Affairs said the upgrade was the biggest in a decade and when combined with seasonal demand, was leading to a massive backlog.
After a stressful two-month wait, Haylee Hollings had been forced to pay an extra $206 for an emergency passport for her 9-month-old daughter.
She applied for the passport in February before the system upgrade but after making an urgent application last Wednesday, she finally received it on Monday.
She said the experience was stressful, especially because they were due to fly later this week.
"Was pretty nerve wracking considering if we were going to change our flight it was going to cost us a lot more than what it was going to cost us to actually pay the urgent fee. For the urgent fee I think was $206 and if we went to change our flights, I'm sure for three of us, was going to be looking at over $200 per person," Hollings said.
Meanwhile, Nicky Hargreaves has been forced to delay her travel in May with her autistic son because of the uncertainty around his passport.
She applied on 11 March and was told she would have to wait four weeks.
A month later she called the Department of Internal Affairs and waited an hour on the phone.
Ten days on, she was still none the wiser.
Ironically, Hargreaves had no issues getting a UK passport after applying the same day she applied for her son's.
"In the meantime I sent all of my information off to England for my UK passport, I got that all back within three weeks and this was delivered to me by courier on Easter Monday, so that included Easter and all of that and everything," Hargreaves said.
Courtney Chalmers had several attempts at re-submitting her husband and daughter's passport photos after they were declined.
After a lot of back and forth she assumed they had finally been approved.
She was due to fly to Australia on 13 May and was frustrated at the prospect of paying extra for an emergency passport.
"I don't want to have to pay extra money that would come out of our holiday spending budget and potentially mean that we can't do certain things when we're on holiday when we thought we had plenty of time in the first place to get this all right," Chalmers said.
The Department of Internal Affairs said more than 43,000 New Zealanders were currently waiting for passports.
The average processing time between January and March this year was 10 working days.
A total of 39,000 passports were completed in February but that figure almost halved in March when the system upgrades began.
House of Travel chief operating officer Brent Thomas was advising everyone to check their passports were still valid.
"People should always have a look at their passport and make sure they've got an up-to-date one because you never know when you may need to travel overseas for whatever the occasion, and so therefore people just taking a moment out of their day just to make sure they've got a current passport," Thomas said.
Internal Affairs said people should expect to wait eight weeks plus delivery time for standard passports although not all will take this long. Urgent passports can be processed in three days plus delivery time.