Passport Ownership When Traveling Around Asia

Answer :

No not usually. Generally you keep your passport as you would expect. Most countries also seem to be quite laid back about getting your passport details and as long as they get them at some time near the start of your stay there's no problem. This of course varies from Hotel to Hostel to Country.

One notable exception is Vietnam, where there is no two ways about it. You have to give the hotel your passport. Not a photocopy but an original (Incidentally Vietnamese citizens are also required to hand over their I.d card.) It's a weird situation where you know that it's your right to keep a hold of what is essentially your property but the hotel owners are equally sure that they are in the right insisting that they receive it. They are really as well as it's the law in Vietnam and they would be the ones in trouble if the police came a knocking. I imagine as tourists become more common this will change but at the moment there doesn't appear to be any way out of it, and actually I've never heard of any problems resulting from handing over your passport anyway-they're usually locked away safe-and you can get it back for an hour or so if you need to change travelers checks or whatever.

Just a short example of how seriously this law is taken: An acquaintance of mine took a short trip out of Hanoi recently and managed to persuade the Hotel owner that a photocopy would do (his passport was at immigration in Hanoi.) The end result of this was the Hotel owner calling the police and them arriving in the early hours of the next morning, questioning him for half an hour, fining him 20 dollars and sending him back to Hanoi with his tail between his legs. Metaphorically speaking that is. I mean he wasn't a dog or anything, or he wouldn't have been able to get a photocopy because dogs don't have passports. And where would he have got the money to pay the fine? Don't suppose he would have been able to answer any questions either unless the question was "What noise does a dog make?" and that wouldn't take half an hour. And anyway I know him, he's human.