We recently had to get passports for our kids and the process was, as my daughter would put it, batshit bananas. We probably waited a touch too long, but with the kids in extracurricular activities and school, it was difficult to set up a time at the post office where all four of us could be together to sit for a passport application appointment. We all had to be there because with Alex being only 14, that meant that both parents had to be present at the appointment. That’s apparently to keep one parent from leaving the country with a child without the other parent knowing about it. Emma was close enough to 18 where they didn’t care if a parent ran off with her.
Our appointment was set 15 1/2 weeks before we were to leave, and at the time, they were saying that normal processing was taking 8 to 11 weeks. When asked if we wanted to pay for expedited service for $60 extra each or have normal processing, we thought that we had plenty of time, why spend the extra money? That turned out to be a mistake. In the time between when we sent the application to the time that it arrived, they changed the processing time to 10 to 13 weeks. If you figure in a week on both ends for shipping, all of a sudden, we were cutting it super close.
We filed the applications and were given a website to check on the progress of those applications. After a couple of weeks, I checked the website and Alex’s passport was showing up on the site as having arrived at the office one week after it was sent but we couldn’t find Emma’s application. I thought, oh, that’s weird, but I was sure it was nothing.
Incorrect Data Hides the Application
We waited a while longer, and I checked every once in a while, but I still couldn’t find Emma’s application and with about 7 weeks before we were to leave, I was starting to get nervous. I decided to call the passport office so that we could locate her application. The passport office told me that there was no other way to look for it other than how the lookup works on the website. The website looks up applications based on the last 4 digits of the social security number, last name and birthdate. I suspected that one of those things were entered into the system incorrectly and that’s why we couldn’t locate it.
Lets back up a second. When Jenn filled out Emma’s application, she wrote down the wrong birthdate. This is unlike Jenn, she’s actually really detailed and she absolutely knows when Emma was born, but she did, in fact, write the date down wrong. That being said, the representative at the post office was extremely thorough, caught the mistake and made the correction on the form by putting a correct date above the original date with the correction initialed.
At this point, my only option was to either wait and pray, or contact my Representative’s office. Of course, I contacted our Representative. A staffer at the office emailed me back for information that they could use to contact the State Department. The staffer then called me later to ask when her birthdate was, and I told him the correct date, and as suspected, the issue was that they entered the incorrect date into the system. Even though a correction was clearly made on the form itself, when the data got entered into the system it took the incorrect date not the corrected date (I suspect they are using some sort of optical character recognition software to enter the data which probably wouldn’t be able to distinguish a correction like that). Either way, why was it possible for a staffer from my Representative’s office able to get that information, but I wasn’t able to? The State Department offers no mechanism for citizens to inquire about a potential mistaken entry other than going through their Senator or Representative. Seriously?
Emma’s passport showed up a couple of weeks later, which indicated to me that the moment that they looked it up, they must’ve decided to process it at that time. Cool! Now we just need to get Alex’s passport.
Expediting a Passport After Applying
In the time between when I inquired about Emma’s application and when she received it, I decided that it would probably make sense for me to go ahead and expedite the passports. We were about 5 weeks from travel, and I’m not great about cutting things close, it makes me extremely nervous, so for my own sanity, let’s just go ahead and spend the extra money and make sure they’ll be here in time. I called the passport office to set that up. The representative told me that they could email me an application for expedited services and they would let me know within 27 days if they could expedite the application. I said “You mean, you’ll have the application complete in 27 days?” “No,” she said “we will tell you in 27 days if we can expedite the application.” “So you’re going to charge me $60 a person to expedite my application and you might not even get to it in time?” I said “We leave in a little over 30 days.” Then she told me “It could take less time than that, and we won’t charge you unless we decide to expedite” Ok, fine, whatever, email me the form.
At this point, I’m pretty upset. What is the point of having services to expedite a passport if it takes a month to decide if you can expedite the damn passport? Then I check for the email and get utterly livid. The instructions on the email include 16 questions that I’m supposed to email back, questions that include entering all of my credit card information. I wouldn’t consider myself to be a security expert, but I’m pretty sure that emailing your credit card number, expiration date and cvv number isn’t kosher. It’s not like this is a local bakery or something, you’re the passport office. You process over 20 million passports a year and take payment for them. You don’t have a secure web payment process? You’re just taking credit card information through email? I mean, thank God nobody ever hacks email accounts! But, of course, I need the passport so I just threw my credit card information out into the ether and hoped nobody ever hacks it.
Panic Mode
At this point, I start emailing the staffer at my Representatives office on a fairly regular basis, trying to get him to pull off whatever magic he did for Emma’s passport. Honestly, I was probably being a bit of a grade A asshole to a guy who honestly didn’t deserve it and was doing his level best to assist. The problem was that once summer hit, the State Department was getting a ton of requests from every Congressperson and Senator from across the country and now they couldn’t even keep up with those requests. He was updating me when he could but you could tell he wasn’t getting updates very quickly from whoever he was in contact with.
At 14 days remaining before your trip, you are now allowed to contact the Passport Office and ask some additional questions. I told my boss that I would be coming in late and I called the Passport Office, and as expected, it took around 3 hours to get in touch with someone. When I finally did, the person on the phone told me she couldn’t get me any information because it wasn’t within 14 days. This is Friday, and we leave in 2 Fridays. That’s 14 days away. She said “We don’t count the day of travel.” Which doesn’t make any sense, but I think what she meant was that because they could actually process the passport on the day of travel then it’s really 15 days if you count the day of travel and the day of the call. Whatever, that’s some seriously insane semantics. I took 3 hours to get connected so that I could be told that 14 days isn’t 14 days. What?!! Whatever, can I at least pay for next day shipping while I have you on the phone? “No,” she told me, “I can’t look up the application until Monday, at that time you can pay for next day shipping”
I called on Monday, which is now just 11 days from when I need the passport in my hand and asked them to look up the passport. They told me that it had been approved and would be printed and shipped within 24 hours. I then asked if I could get the shipping upgraded to next day and was told that it was too late for that and that I could expect the passport in 1-2 weeks. So then I asked what I was to do if it actually took 2 weeks and I was told that if we didn’t get it before 5 days prior to travel, then I could request an in person appointment.
To be clear, I had requested next day shipping at 5 weeks prior, 14 days prior and 11 days prior and was unable to pull that off. I really wasn’t nervous at this point, however, because I’ve never had anything take 2 weeks in the US mail. It ended up being delivered in 3 days. That’s the good news, but all I can think of is just how useless all of this was. I had over 20 emails back and forth with my Congressperson’s office, several phone calls to the State Department and about half of the hair that I started this process with. Throughout the entire process, I kept reading about peoples’ experiences and I really did have one conclusion – they were always going to make sure we had the passport. If that’s the case, then, why not just do something on the customer service side to calm me down and make sure that I’m not going to get frustrated with your customer service reps and my Congressional Representative’s office? In the end, I wasted so much time for myself and so many people and it was all really preventable.
A Modest Proposal
It seems to me that a good, modern website could fix these issues and save a whole lot of labor for both the State Department and Congressional staffers. A redesign of the website to function better for applicants would make the process much smoother. Just as is does now, after filling out your application, you should be able to go to the website and check on the status. However, instead of just seeing a message that says “In Process” it should say “Based on the service requested, and the number of applications that we have, we anticipate that your application will be processed on the week of [date range]. After processing, please allow up to two weeks for shipping. If that is not soon enough, please choose from the below options to expedite processing or shipping.” Below that should be the ability to add expedited shipping or processing to a cart and you could then pay for those additional services with a credit card on a secure payment processor. Once you paid the new information should be displayed on the page with updated dates and/or shipping times. This is fairly basic and could free up so much time and effort for the State Department.
That being said, I don’t anticipate the State Department will do anything like this soon. My take away from this entire experience is that if you allow the State Department enough time to process your passport, they will get it done and you probably don’t need to make a hundred phone calls for them to do so. They know when the date of your travel is and they know it takes around 3-5 days normally to ship something. It’ll get done. I just don’t know why they feel the need to hold back information and needlessly stress citizens out. My passport is expiring in about 8 months and I’m going to apply for a renewal soon, without a planned trip, because frankly, I can’t take the stress of having a trip planned and not knowing for sure that it’s actually going to happen. I’m never going to put myself through this again and all of this stress took away from the anticipation of taking what I hope will be an incredible vacation. But now that this is over, we can concentrate on the most important thing – We’re going to Europe!
Newby to Expert Traveler 