Is it common for border guards to disregard available passport space like in this image?
These are stamps from Guadeloupe and Martinique in my mother's passport.
On the left page it's obvious the border guards could've used the right edge. Is it common for them not to?
Best Answer
A standard passport has about 30 visa pages (varies slightly from country to country). Most passport have a 10 year validity. That means 3 visa pages per year.
For the average (leisure) traveller, which probably travels at most once a year to a country that will put a stamp (or often two) in their passport, that means there's really no need to conserve space at all, and immigration officers, stamping hundreds of passports every day, will certainly not waste even a second to save space, they'll just find the first page they can whack a stamp on in the shortest time possible. That's just human nature.
Business travellers may have more trouble with this, though I expect immigration officers to become a bit more attentive to space requirements once the visa pages start to fill up. Note also that in many countries, you can get passports with more pages, and of course you can renew your passport once it's full or close to. Some will probably have more trouble with actual visas (which take a whole page) rather than stamps.
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