A documentation error at Nice airport grounded seven travelers on Tuesday when an EasyJet agent confused Mauritian passengers with citizens of Mauritania, a different country entirely, and refused to let them board a flight to Rome.
The group, mostly elderly travelers in their seventies with one 90-year-old woman requiring assistance, arrived at the gate with complete documentation in order. A document-control agent flagged the five Mauritian passengers, insisting they needed visas to enter Italy. When the passengers and their companions corrected the error, a supervisor backed the agent’s position, apparently still convinced the travelers held Mauritanian passports rather than Mauritian ones.
The failure compounded across checkpoints. Passenger explanations went unheeded. Border police eventually intervened and identified the mistake, but by then the airline had already made its call: the passengers would not board. Ground staff pulled their baggage from the hold and the flight left without them.
The two countries are not interchangeable. Mauritius is an island nation in the Indian Ocean whose citizens do not require visas to enter Italy. Mauritania is a West African country whose citizens do. That distinction, apparently missed at multiple levels of gate staffing, is what grounded the group.
EasyJet rebooked all seven travelers on an evening departure the same day and issued meal vouchers. The passengers reached Rome around 10:30 p.m., several hours behind schedule. For the 90-year-old traveler requiring assistance, the extended wait and rebooking carried practical consequences beyond a simple delay.
The passengers have since filed a formal complaint with EasyJet, invoking European Union regulations on air passenger rights and seeking compensation for the unjustified denial of boarding. At the time of reporting, EasyJet had not commented on the incident or acknowledged the procedural failure at the gate.
What the episode exposes is a gap in document-verification training at the departure level. A confusion that border police resolved quickly persisted long enough through the airline’s own staffing chain to remove seven passengers from a flight, trigger a baggage offload, and require a full rebooking operation. Administrative errors in document control, when left uncorrected across multiple checkpoints, generate exactly this kind of downstream disruption.
Whether EasyJet’s response to the formal complaint will include any review of its gate verification procedures at Nice remains to be seen.