WASHINGTON DC—Looking for a valid US passport for that 2023 trip? Buckle up, eager traveler, for a very different ride before you approach an airport.
A feared backup of US passport applications has slammed into a wall of government red tape as worldwide travel recovers to pre-pandemic record levels, with too few humans to handle the load. . The result, say would-be travelers in the US and around the world, is a maddening pre-trip purgatory defined, at best, by costly uncertainty.
With family dreams and big money on the line, passport seekers describe a slow-motion agony of waiting, worrying, standing in line, updating the screen, complaining to Congress, paying extra fees and following incorrect instructions. Some applicants are purchasing additional airline tickets to get passports processed where they sit, in other cities, in time to catch the flights they booked in the first place.
So bleak is the picture that US officials are not even denying the problem or predicting when it will ease. They’re blaming the epic wait times on persistent pandemic-related staff shortages and a lull in online processing this year. That left the passport agency inundated with a record 500,000 applications a week. The deluge is on track to surpass the 22 million passports issued last year, the State Department says.
Applicant stories and Associated Press interviews describe a crisis management system, in which agencies prioritize urgent cases, such as applicants traveling for “life or death” reasons and those traveling only for few days. For everyone else, the options are few and expensive.
So, traveler of 2023, if you still need a valid US passport, prepare for an unplanned excursion into the nightmare zone.
“A LONG TIME” TO “WE WILL STILL BE OKAY” TO BIG TROUBLE
It was early March when Dallas-area florist Ginger Collier applied for four passports ahead of a family vacation in late June. The clerk, she said, estimated wait times at eight to 11 weeks. They would have their passports a month before they needed them. A long time, Collier remembered thinking.
The State Department then increased the wait time for a regular passport to 13 weeks. We’ll still be fine, she thought.
With less than two weeks to travel, this was his assessment: “I can’t sleep.” This after months of calling, waiting, hitting update on a website, testing his congressman, and stressing out as his departure date approached. Not getting the family’s passports would mean losing $4,000, she said, as well as the chance to meet one of her children in Italy after a semester of study abroad.
“My nerves are shot, because I may not be able to get to him,” he said. She calls the toll-free number every day, waiting up to 90 minutes to be told, at best, that she could get a required appointment at passport offices in other states.
“I can’t afford four more plane tickets anywhere in the US to get a passport when I applied early enough,” he said. “How about they just process my passports?”
THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT HAS A GUILTY: COVID
In March, concerned travelers began asking for answers and then demanding help, including from their representatives in the House and Senate, who widely reported in hearings this year that they were getting more complaints from voters about passport delays than about any other problem.
The US Secretary of State had something of an answer.
“With COVID, the bottom of the system basically fell out,” Antony Blinken told a House subcommittee on March 23. When travel demand all but disappeared during the pandemic, he said, the government laid off contractors and reassigned staff who had been handling passports.
Around the same time, the government also halted an online renewal system “to make sure we can adjust and improve it,” Blinken said. He said the department is hiring officers as quickly as possible, opening more appointments and trying to address the crisis in other ways.
Passport applicants flooded lawmakers’ social media groups, toll-free numbers and phone lines with questions, requests for advice and cries for help. Facebook and WhatsApp groups bristled with reports of bewilderment and anger. Reddit posted dazzling diaries, some over 1,000 words long, of application dates, deposits sent, contacts made, time on hold, money spent, and requests for advice.
It was in 1952 that a law required, for the first time, passports for all American travelers abroad, even in peacetime. Passports are now processed at centers across the country and printed at secure facilities in Washington, DC and Mississippi, according to the Government Printing Office.
But the number of Americans holding valid US passports has grown about 10% faster than population in the last three decades, according to Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
After passport delays derailed his own plans to travel to London earlier this year, Zagorsky found that the number of US passports per American has skyrocketed from roughly three per 100 people in 1989 to nearly 46 per 100. people in 2022. Americans, it turns out, are on the move.
“As a society gets richer,” says Zagorsky, “people in that society say, ‘I want to visit the rest of the world.’”
FOR AMERICANS AND OTHERS ABROAD, IT’S NOT A PICNIC, EITHER
At US consulates abroad, the search for US visas and passports isn’t much brighter.
On a day in June, people in New Delhi could wait 451 days for a visa interview, according to the website. Those from Sao Paulo could wait more than 600 days. Would-be travelers in Mexico City were waiting about 750 days; in Bogotá, Colombia, it was 801 days.
In Israel, the need is especially acute. More than 200,000 people with citizenship in both countries live in Israel. It is one appointment per person, even for newborns, who must have both parents involved in the process, before traveling to the US.
Batsheva Gutterman began looking for three dates immediately after having a baby in December, with an eye toward attending a family celebration in July in Raleigh, North Carolina.
His search for three passports stretched from January to June, days before the trip. And it was only resolved after Gutterman paid a small fee to join a WhatsApp group that alerted her to new appointments, which remain available for only a few seconds. She finally got three dates in three consecutive days: red tape incarnate.
“We had to take the whole family with three small children an hour and a half to Tel Aviv three days in a row, without going to work or school,” he said. “This makes me incredibly uneasy about having a baby in Israel as an American citizen, knowing there is no way I can fly with that baby until we get lucky with a date.”
Recently, there seemed to be some progress. The wait for an appointment for a renewed US passport was 360 days on June 8. On July 2, the wait was reduced to 90 days, according to the website.
FRUSTRATING TALES COME OUT OF THE TRENCHES
Back in the US, Marni Larsen of Holladay, Utah, lined up in Los Angeles, California, on June 14, hoping to get her son’s passport. That way, she hoped, the couple could meet the rest of their family, who had already left for Europe as scheduled, for a long-planned vacation.
She had applied for her son’s passport two months earlier and spent weeks searching for updates online or through a frustrating calling system. As the mid-June vacation approached, Larsen stopped by Senator Mitt Romney’s office, where one of the four people he says is assigned full-time to passport issues was able to locate the document in New Orleans.
It was supposed to be shipped to Los Angeles, where he got an appointment to retrieve it. That meant Larsen had to buy new tickets for her and her son’s to Los Angeles and redirect their trip from there to Rome. All on the bet that her son’s passport was sent as promised.
“We’re just waiting in this massive line of tons of people,” Larsen said. “It’s just been a nightmare.”
These are the most powerful passports in the world, according to the annual Passport Index 2022 report.
They did it. But not everyone has been so lucky.
Miranda Richter personally applied for passport renewals for herself and her husband, as well as applied for a new one on February 9 for a trip with her neighbors to Croatia on June 6. She ended up canceling, losing over $1,000.
Her timeline went like this: Her husband and daughter’s passports arrived in 11 weeks, while Richter’s photo was rejected. On May 4, she sent a new one via priority mail. She then paid a rush fee of $79, which was never charged to her credit card. Between May 30 and June 2, four days before the trip, Richter and her husband spent more than 12 hours in the national passport line while calling their congressman, senators and outside messengers.
Finally, he showed up in person at the federal building in downtown Houston, 30 minutes before the passport office opened. Richter said there were at least 100 people in line.
“The security guard asked me when my appointment was and I started crying,” she recalls. She couldn’t get one. “It didn’t work.”
FINALLY: A HAPPY ENDING
“I just received my passports!” read texts by Ginger Collier.
She ended up showing up at the passport office in Dallas with her daughter-in-law at 6:30 am and they sorted her into groups and lined her up against the walls. Finally, they were called to a window, where the agent was “super nice” and pulled out the family’s four applications, documents that had been in the office since March 17. More than seven hours later, the two left the office with instructions. to collect their passports the next day.
They did, with four days to spare.
“What a ridiculous process,” says Collier. However, the reunion with her son in Italy was sweet. She texted last week: “That was the best hug ever!”
