Has anyone else applied for a passport lately? Well it's turned into quite a nightmare for many travelers. Wait times often last several months. What's really infuriating is that the State Department website still says that routine wait times are 10-13 weeks and expedited wait times are 7-9 weeks (for an extra 60 bucks). People make travel plans based on these estimates. Unfortunately, there are a lot of travelers that are completely out of luck and are losing thousands of dollars on booked travel.
My two adult sons, Colton and Travis, were almost in the same boat. This past March they planned a dream trip to Japan. They both applied the same day for their passport at the Houston passport office. We delayed their original plans by a month to allow plenty of time for processing, because I had read that there were some delays (they originally planned to go in June). We paid the extra $60 for expedited processing about 14-15 weeks before the July 3 trip.
Colton got his passport in about six weeks. There was no sign of the other. Weeks went by. Travis kept checking the State Department website. It just kept saying the same thing: processing. After about 10 weeks, he started calling. They just told him to keep checking the website and call back two weeks prior to the trip.
Two weeks prior, he started calling every day. They still couldn't tell him anything. He was starting to panic, as he had saved up his money for this trip. I was out of town myself at the time, so didn't have much time to assist.
Finally six days before the trip, I contacted Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee's office in Washington (I live in Rep. Jackson Lee's district in Houston). Her staff could not have been more helpful. Her deputy chief of staff, Bronson Elliott Woods, immediately sent an inquiry to the passport office once we filled out some paperwork. He got immediate results.
We kept in email contact and two days later he contacted us to let us know the passport was ready and even gave us the tracking number for the delivery. We received it the next day. I could not have been more impressed with this level of constituent services from a U.S. representative. I'm grateful to them for saving my sons' dream travel plan. They are in Japan now.
What is really frustrating is that it seems that the State Department process is random. Two people apply at the exact same same time, and there is a huge difference in when they are processed? It makes no sense. There was no apparent problem with the application or the paperwork submitted. At no time did they contact us to say there was anything missing. It just took a long time for no apparent reason.
I understand there is overwhelming demand for international travel this year due to pent up demand from the pandemic. But what really upsets me is that people are making travel plans based on the time estimates on the State Department website. Even after acknowledging to media outlets for months that there are long delays, they STILL have not updated that information on their website to warn travelers of major delays.
This clusterf#%@ might be significantly less of a debacle, with fewer travel plans ruined, if people simply had the right information at the time they made their plans. I know for certain we would have delayed the trip longer if we had known how bad the delays were.
And before anyone jumps on this as an example of government incompetence, remember that we've also seen several free market airlines – including Southwest and United – make absolute messes of travel plans in the past year for hundreds of thousands of people due to incompetence and greedy overbooking.
Last year it was supply-chain snafus. This year it's travel turmoil. Maybe next year we'll be out of this pandemic-era disarray.
P.S. I often hide my boys' names in my cartoons. I've been doing it since they were born, although sometimes I forget, especially when I'm juggling too many tasks. I almost forgot today, but realized while writing this that it would be ironic to forget to put their names in a cartoon they helped inspire. It can be hard to find the names in the online version. You can see Colton and Travis in this enlargement of the bottom of the snail:
what's the possibility the State Dept has some work farmed out to private contractors? This smells like that, frankly. Congress has to fund the departments, and there IS a bent toward prvatizing, y'know . . . I do like that you had the good sense to reach out to your Congressperson, AND that she has a good staff to take care of the matter!
Nick- I am sorry your sons had such a miserable experience. Hope they are having a great time in Japan.