A family’s World Cup dreams were dashed after their five-year-old daughter was stopped from boarding a flight due to a visa snafu.
Rhian Hayes, 39, said her two children, daughter Orla and son Harrison, eight, burst into tears at London’s Heathrow Airport on Wednesday morning.
The Hayes family had saved for three years for the two-week, £7,000 trip that included seeing four of the 64 matches.
But a glitch in Qatar’s fan ID system meant Orla’s visa application wasn’t approved in time.
It was eventually signed off — 12 hours after the Hayes’ flight.
Rhian told MailOnline that she and her family were already back at their home in Newport, Wales, by then.
‘We feel absolutely gutted for the kids. We had been saving up for this for years and it comes at a time when you’ve just been hit by a financial crisis. It’s just devastating,’ she said.
‘I hope it doesn’t scar the children. Everything was linked to my five-year-old.
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‘She’s apologising saying, “I’m so sorry”. We’re trying to say to her, “It’s not your fault. It’s the system’s fault”.
‘All she is hearing is Orla Hayes, Orla Hayes. We can’t fly because of Orla Hayes. Poor thing.’
Rhian’s football-loving son, Harrison, was left ‘devastated’ by the news.
‘Having the whole thing ripped from you for no reason,’ she added, ‘it’s horrendous.’
World Cup visitors need an all-purpose identification card called Hayya (Hayya means ‘let’s go’) to get into Qatar and see tournament matches.
Hayya cards are operated by the Qatari government rather than FIFA and have a QR code that acts as a fast-tracked visa into the nation itself.
Rhian claimed her daughter’s application for a Hayya card was meant to take less than five days to approve but ended up being held for 10 weeks.
Qatari officials allegedly advised the Hayes to sort out the snag with immigration staff when they would have arrived at Doha airport that evening.
The family arrived at the airport at 5:30am before queuing for their Qatar Airways flight for an hour and a half.
At the check-in desk, however, staff for the state-owned airline said Orla couldn’t board without her digital pass.
‘They wouldn’t let us get on the flight. There was no support there at all. It was an absolute shambles,’ Rhian said.
‘We spoke to a manager at the airport and he said, “No. You cannot get on this flight”. There was no kind of “What an awful situation you are in, let’s just see if we can phone anybody for you”. It was just so unfair,’ she added.
The Hayes family applied for the cards in mid-September only for their little girl’s application to be stuck in ‘pending’ for months.
‘Both the children were put through on my husband’s Hayya as that’s the way the system works for dependents. It just didn’t make sense that my five-year-olds didn’t go through, Rhian said.
‘We started to worry.’
Their friends in Qatar found out by contacting immigration officials that the ‘visa was there but there was an error with the link on the app’, Rhia said.
‘It was like she was stuck in the system and nobody there could escalate or do anything about it,’ she added.
‘We called them and called them. They kept saying we promise this will be sorted within 24 hours but it never was.
‘On Monday we were panicking. We called them again. We were given advice to continue to travel and sort it out in Doha.
‘He said, “Don’t worry. We will not be leaving people in the lurch. You will get on your flight and we will get you your physical copy when you get to Doha”.
`We took them at their word. We travelled to Heathrow on Wednesday but they wouldn’t let us get on the flight. It was an absolute shambles.’
The family, unable to pay out an extra £5,000 to rebook, gave up after hours at Heathrow and went back home.
‘To rub salt into the wounds my daughter got approved at 8pm that night,’ Rhian added, ‘it just came through on the app.
‘We thought this was ridiculous. We have been chasing for weeks. We were absolutely heartbroken.
‘It was a slap in the face for us that we had got home and it was finally approved.’
Qatar Airways says it is investigating the incident.
Metro.co.uk contacted the Hayya platform for comment.
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