Passport requirements slow, but don't stop, travelers

That’s how Anna Meek-Baker describes the impact of the U.S. government’s recently implemented passport requirements for air travel to Mexico, Canada, Bermuda and the Caribbean. Though the new rules took effect in January, a busy summer travel season has made passport delays common.

Lynda Anderson, of Springfield, encountered that delay firsthand when embarking on a June 13–22 mission trip in Costa Rica. Though Anderson, a stay-at-home wife and mother, filed her passport paperwork March 10, processing delays resulted in a June 12 trip to the U.S. Passport Agency in Chicago, the day before the Park Crest Baptist Church group was to leave.

“It was really just a terrible situation,” she said of the Chicago office. “The people who were working were under a lot of stress … a lot of people were angry, and they had to deal with that every day.”

Meek-Baker, supervisor of customer services at the U.S. Postal Service’s main Springfield location, 500 W. Chestnut Expressway, said pressure on the post office’s Passport Acceptance service is tremendous, but it has lessened since the first quarter.

At that time, so many people were showing up to apply for passports at Springfield, Nixa and Republic post offices that all three had to go to an appointment-only system to deal with huge lines and long waits.

The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative requirement that U.S. air travelers to Mexico, Canada, Bermuda and the Caribbean have passports became effective Jan. 23.

In February, “we were booking appointments every 10 minutes, we were working 10 hours a day, and we were booking four weeks ahead of time because we were so busy,” Meek-Baker said. Her office also had to assign a full-time staffer just to answer the approximately 200 phone calls that were coming in daily.

Demand has slowed somewhat since then, and appointments are now being booked one week out. But Meek-Baker is still getting complaints from people who applied for passports in March – when travelers were told to expect a 10- to 12-week turnaround – and still don’t have them.

Customers are frustrated, but so is Meek-Baker’s staff, which bears the brunt of customer outrage but can do nothing to speed the process. Passport Acceptance offices do not process applications; they merely collect them and forward them to U.S. Passport agencies.

Although the U.S. State Department has upped staffing and gone to 24-hour operations at some processing facilities, would-be international travelers should be aware that turnaround times have continued to slow.

“We have seen this summer that the delay has been significantly longer even than it was right after the first of the year,” said Sara Krutsinger, partner/co-owner of The Travel Group. “I definitely would tell people to allow three months to be safe.”

Meek-Baker added, “We’re up to 13 and 14 weeks for a normal passport to get back.”

Speeding things up

Passport applications may be expedited for a fee, but the process won’t speed up as much as it used to. A $60 government surcharge will get an application processed in six to eight weeks – a turnaround that formerly took about two weeks.

Faster service also can be obtained through private passport expeditors, but an online search of such services reveals charges as high as $400 for a one- or two-day turnaround. That figure does not include shipping costs or the standard government passport fee of $97.

“Bottom dollar, it’s costing quite a bit of money for people to get passports,” Krutsinger said.

Freelance graphic artist John Pruett, of Springfield, paid an extra $85 to expedite his passport for a March Christian Campus House mission trip to Mexico with his son and his son’s girlfriend.

Though he filed his paperwork 10 weeks prior to the trip, he chose to expedite the process when online estimates showed that his passport wouldn’t arrive until after he was supposed to leave for Mexico.

“It was miraculous how fast they turned it around, after (I) paid the $85, and they sent it back (via) FedEx,” Pruett said, noting that his passport arrived exactly a week after he expedited his request, and about a week before he left for Mexico.

Anxious travelers awaiting passports theoretically got a reprieve June 8, when the government announced that travelers to Mexico, Canada, Bermuda or the Caribbean who had applied for but not received a passport could travel temporarily with a printout of an official online confirmation form and a valid government ID, such as a driver’s license.

“That helped tremendously,” said Kris Conley, managing director of Great Southern Travel.

Pruett said the reprieve came after he’d already begun the expediting process, so his son and his girlfriend wouldn’t have needed to expedite, though oddly enough, their passports arrived the day before departure, even without any extra fees.

The online confirmation option, however, is not a complete solution, Meek-Baker noted.

Some of the people who applied in March and complained they don’t yet have passports also found they don’t have online confirmations.

That was the case for Anderson. She and her fellow travelers – who were also waiting on their passports, but had confirmation numbers – opted to head to Chicago to make sure everything was in order. They left Springfield at 11 p.m. June 11, and arrived in Chicago at 7 a.m. on June 12.

“The passport office wasn’t even open until 9, but the place was absolutely packed by 8 o’clock in the morning,” Anderson said, noting that everyone there had a “passport story” from honeymooners trying to get abroad to a foreign exchange student whose paperwork had been lost.

“We were thrust into another culture, if you will,” she added. “I never felt so out of place in all my life, and … because I’m an American citizen, I did not expect to be pushed around and told not to talk (or) ask questions. … But that’s what they did.”

After waiting in long lines and handling lots of paperwork, Anderson was finally able to get what she needed for the trip, and the group arrived back in Springfield with an hour to spare before they headed to Tulsa to catch their flight to Costa Rica. Ironically, Anderson said, her passport was waiting in the mailbox when she returned home.

Generally, USPS’ Meek-Baker said, online confirmations are appearing about four weeks after applications sent via priority mail to the designated Passport Agency. The provision allowing temporary travel with an online confirmation expires Sept. 30.

Changing plans

Local travel agencies report that few people have canceled their travel plans due to the passport issue, but many have had to reschedule or have changed destinations.

“The alternative we’re seeing is people, instead of going to Mexico or the Caribbean, are going to Hawaii, or maybe looking at that Alaska-type situation,” Conley said.

While the passport fracas has caused a lot of anxiety among travelers, he added, it’s had little impact on Great Southern’s business.

“We’ve just finished the biggest first quarter we’ve ever had in cruise and tour sales,” Conley said.

Need a Passport?

To view the requirements for obtaining a U.S. Passport, visit http://travel.state.gov/passport.

Features Editor Maria Hoover contributed to this story.