Families with two or three children are where eTA applications go wrong most often — and not because parents are careless. It is because five passports are open on the kitchen table at eleven at night, the form asks the same questions five times, and somewhere around the fourth passport the names and numbers start to drift.

The classic result, which we see at GetETA every week: the first child’s name, the second child’s passport number, and the third child’s date of birth — all on one application. Every field looks plausible. Nothing matches any real passport. The eTA is refused or silently useless at check-in, and the fix takes weeks, not minutes.

A true story (the usual one)

A family of five ordered five eTAs from us at once. Some of the passports arrived as scans, some of the data was typed in by hand. On the typed ones the mix-up had already happened — a child’s details were spread across two forms. We asked for the remaining scans, took each passport one by one, rebuilt each application from its own passport, and all five were approved. They flew together.

If those typed forms had been submitted as they were, two of the children would have been refused, the corrected applications would have gone into a slow manual review, and the family would not have flown as a family. That is not a rare outcome — it is the standard outcome when three kids’ data gets mixed.

The rule: one passport, one form, one sitting

Do not open all the passports at once. Do not “do the kids together”. The whole checklist is built on one idea: nothing from passport A is on the table while you fill in form B.

The checklist

Before you start

  • Every traveller has their own valid passport — including babies.
  • You have a quiet 15 minutes per person. Five people, five separate sittings if needed. Not at the airport, not the night before.
  • One email address for the family is fine — but you will receive one approval per person, so you will need to match each email to each passport afterwards.

For each person, in turn

  • Put only this one passport next to the screen. Close the others.
  • Start a fresh form. Do not reuse, copy, or “edit” a previous one — that is how the last child’s passport number ends up on the next child’s form.
  • Surname and given names exactly as on the passport, in the right boxes. Check the machine-readable line at the bottom for spelling.
  • Passport number: read it aloud, character by character. Letter O vs zero, letter I vs one — read it from the bottom line of the passport.
  • Three dates, in this order, and check each one twice: date of birth → passport issue date → passport expiry date. The most common family mistake is the issue date typed into the birth date field — it happens because a parent knows their own birthday by heart but reads the children’s dates off the passport, line by line, and slides one down.
  • Country of citizenship and country that issued the passport — same for the whole family? Not always (grandparents, a child born abroad). Check per passport.
  • Before paying: read the summary screen against the passport, not against your memory. Every field.
  • Submit. Close the form. Then pick up the next passport.

After everyone has applied

  • Count the approval emails: one eTA number per passport. Missing one? Search spam, then run a status check for that passport.
  • Save all approvals in one folder on your phone, named by person.
  • Only now book anything non-refundable. Why the order matters: tickets first or eTA first.

Scan the passports — it cuts the problems by about two-thirds

In our experience, applications built from a scan or clear photo of the passport have roughly a third of the errors of applications typed from memory or from a handwritten list. Not because parents type badly — because a scan forces you to look at the actual document for every field, and it lets a second person check the form against it.

That is exactly how we work: you upload a photo of each passport, we fill each form from that passport only, one at a time, and a person cross-checks every field before anything is submitted. For a family of five that is the difference between five approvals the same evening and a two-week scramble for the two kids whose forms got mixed. Apply for the family here.

If it already went wrong

  • One child refused, the rest approved — the rest are fine; approvals are individual. Fix only that child’s application. Step by step: what a refusal means and what to do.
  • You are not sure which child’s data went where — run a status check for each passport. It tells you which passports actually have a valid eTA and which do not.
  • Flight is within days — do the fix today, not tomorrow, and read how long an eTA takes to understand what “pending” means for you.

Official information: eTA facts