Heading to New York on Friday and was just wondering if anyone knows do you have to have one of them new passports?? My one is'nt hand witten but its not one of the new ones with the hard plastic page with the photo scanned onto it.. Its just the one with the photo stuck on it and it's like its laminated?? Has the barcode thingy at the bottom but all the other people have the new passports??
Are you guys sure? I went to the States last year and travel agent advised me to get new passport...I had an older one that was handwritten and was not issued in Dublin but was issued in Canberra..Not sure if that made the difference but my impression was that for the US everyone needed one of the new fangled passports!
Basically passports were handwritten, then machine readable and now microchipped. Machine Readable and Microchipped are now still valid for the Visa Waiver programme. Handwritten passports require a Visa.