According to the US State Department website, the current US passport renewal period is 10-13 weeks, excluding the time it takes to mail your old passport or the time it takes for your new passport to be mailed to you. . If you pay an extra $60 on top of the normal $130 fee, the expedited time is 7-9 weeks, however, according to a new report from Related pressyou might not want to try and cut most of it if you’re going abroad and need a passport renew. Because the alternative sounds like travel hell.
Because so-called “revenge tourism” — the idea that we’ve all been confined for so long because of the pandemic and, you know, it sure would be nice to see the world before we die — passport applications and renewals have increased by about half a million passport applications per week, according to APand the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that by 2023 it will release more than 22 million passports issued last year.
That has resulted in lengthy passport waits, which the government attributes to a shortage of workers, and also to the lingering effects of restarting largely stalled processes at the beginning. pandemic, when no one is going anywhere and the demand for passports is huge. short.
At any rate, as documented by AP, there are travelers who accidentally risk their trip so you don’t have to. Take this poor traveler:
It was early March when Dallas-area florist Ginger Collier applied for four passports ahead of a family vacation in late June. The salesperson estimated a wait time of eight to 11 weeks, she said. They will have their passports a month before they need them. “A lot of time,” Collier recalls thinking.
Subsequently, the State Department increased the waiting time for ordinary passports to 13 weeks. “We’ll be fine,” she thought.
As for T-min with two weeks left to travel, here’s her assessment: “I can’t sleep.” This follows months of calling, waiting, hitting the refresh button on a website, challenging her membership of Congress – and the stress of the departure date draws near. She said failing to get her family’s passport would mean losing $4,000 as well as the chance to meet one of her sons in Italy after a semester abroad.
She said: “My nerves were shot out, because I might not be able to get to him. She calls the toll-free number every day, keeping up to 90 minutes to be told — at best — that she can get an appointment on demand at passport offices in other states .
“I couldn’t afford four more plane tickets anywhere in the US to get a passport when I had applied for so long,” she said. “What if they just process my passport?”
In the end, she got her passport and made their trip after going to an office in Dallas in person and waiting a few hours just days before their flight departed. But not everyone is so lucky:
Miranda Richter personally applied for passport renewals for herself and her husband, as well as for new passports on February 9 for a trip with their neighbors to Croatia on June 6. canceled, lost more than $1,000.
Her timeline goes like this: Passports for her husband and daughter arrived after 11 weeks, while Richter’s photo was rejected. On May 4, she sent a new one via priority mail. She then paid a $79 fold fee, 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 on the national passport line while phoning congressmen, senators and third-party messengers their.
Finally, she 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 queuing.
“The security guard asked when my appointment was, and I burst into tears,” she recalls. She can’t get one. “It’s not working.”
I may or may not stop reading this article halfway through to confirm that my passport won’t expire until 2027, so hopefully in a few years when I need to renew it, the State Department will get out of a predicament, but it seems so, now, in the near future, it’s reasonable to expect the unexpected if you’re going somewhere and need to renew or get your passport for the first time and start completing it. get it done at least six months in advance. Or even earlier than you think, because there are many countries requires at least six months of passport validity to allow you to enter. A great way to ruin your trip abroad is to spend the previous few weeks de-stressing. Or so I read.
