Travelling to the US on a 9 year old passport

iguana

I am planning on visiting a friend of mine in Chicago next month, but my passport is nearly 9 years old and I'm not sure if that will be accepted. I've looked into it on the ESTA website, but it only talks about passports issued on or after Oct 05. It's not clear about passports issued before then.

My passport does have the two lines at the bottom which read;

P<IRLSURNAME<<FIRSTNAME<MIDDLENAME<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
PPORTNUMBER<<0IRLDATEOFBIRTH5FANOTHERNUMBER<<<<<<<<<<8

Is that sufficient to allow me to travel or do I have to rush a new passport through? I haven't booked any flights yet.

Eta: Just read back through the website, I think my passport should be ok as mine was issued before Oct 05. But if anyone has traveled on a passport like mine I'd really like to hear if they had any problems.

leeroybrown

It should be fine. The two lines at the bottom mean that it's a machine readable password which is valid for VWP purposes. The date mentioned will refer to the introduction of e-passports which replaced machine readable passports at around that time. I've been through a couple of times in the last few years on my 2001 passport which will be identical to yours.

iguana

Excellent thanks.

Now I just have to hope all the anti-war demos I went on hasn't resulted on me being in some sort of Access Denied list.:(;)