Passport Services announced formally that expedited passport turnaround would take ten days for internal processing rather than three days.
Although criticized by members of Congress, the move by Passport Services is a move we applaud. They are simply acknowledging the reality they face.
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This article covers the subject of passports and visas very well. Porter Briggs, president of A Briggs, is quoted extensively. If you need a passport in a hurry, there is good information in this article.
You’ll find the article on pages 16 to 20 of the issue shown, August 6, 2007.
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Planning a trip? Is your passport up to date? Click here to order or renew your passport.
President Bush has signed a new law authorizing the State Department to hire retired Foreign Service officers to help with the backlog of passport applications.
This should be of some help in getting “expedited passports” turned around more quickly. “Expedited passport processing” has been taking as long as six to eight weeks instead of two to three weeks as was formerly the case.
The article below, about the problems securing a passport, appeared on Yahoo today. The fact is that even an expedited passport can take six weeks to be issued. Here is the article:
Need a passport in a hurry? Good luck!
By BETH J. HARPAZ, AP Travel Editor
NEW YORK - Need a passport in a hurry? Good luck!
You can pay extra for expedited service from the State Department, but there are no guarantees. You can ask for an appointment at a passport center, but you may not get one. You can ask your congressman to intervene. Or you can hire a private expediter.
Whatever you do, the experience may leave you bitter.
“The last few months have been the most expensive, the most frustrating and the most nerve-racking time that I’ve had in my life,” said James Meehan, 21, a University of Southern California student who spent hours on the phone and hours at the federal building in Los Angeles trying to get the passport he applied for in May for a trip to Brazil in July. It didn’t arrive in time, so he also had to pay to change his tickets.
“There’s nobody to help and there’s nobody to care,” Meehan said. “You really do not have a voice. After all the problems I faced, who am I going to call? President Bush? The Better Business Bureau? I can’t take my service elsewhere. It’s not like canceling a cell phone.”
The six-week process for obtaining a passport ballooned to 12 weeks when new regulations were imposed in January requiring passports for air travel from Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean. Last month those rules were relaxed. Now Americans returning from those countries only need a receipt showing they applied for a passport.
But a backlog in processing passports remains. Here are options for desperate travelers, with anecdotes about how well they work.
• You can pay $60 plus overnight delivery fees for expedited service from the State Department. “The process can generally be completed in about two to three weeks,” said Ann Barrett, deputy assistant secretary of state for passport services.
Maura Harty, assistant secretary of consular affairs, said that “we regularly provide passports in one day or, in some cases, the same day, for travelers with urgent needs,” including “life-and-death emergencies.”
For leisure travel, Jessica Labaire of TNT Vacations in Boston said the expedited service “often works, but in many cases, it has not worked. It’s been completely sporadic.” Many TNT customers canceled trips this year when passports did not arrive in time. “We estimate a 10 to 20 percent loss in business because of this,” she said.
Jacqueline Hahey, 25, of Scottsdale, Ariz., applied for an expedited passport in May and got it in a week, in time for a trip to Costa Rica. “I”d just heard so many horrible stories, I almost fell over when it arrived at my door,” she said. “But it’s really so random - it’s the luck of the draw.”
• You can try getting help or an appointment by phone. “We encourage applicants seeking expedited service to contact us first for an appointment. Depending on the situation, we may be able to provide expedited service without having them come to a passport office,” said Barrett.
But getting through isn’t easy. “After 10 to 15 minutes of dead silence on the phone, you get a recording that says, ‘We’re sorry, there are no appointments available.’ Then they hang up on you,” said Meehan.
Amy Pennar, 22, of Tempe, Ariz., applied for a passport 14 weeks before her June 2 wedding in Poland. She panicked when it hadn’t arrived by mid-May.
“I’m frantically calling every day, but it would take two hours to get through, and so many people are on hold, it just hangs up on you,” said Pennar.
• You can contact your congressional representative.
With help from Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., Pennar got her passport, and made it to the church in Krakow on time.
“We’ve had well over 200 cases in just the past two months,” said Flake spokesman Matt Specht.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami, who called the passport backlog “outrageous, incomprehensible, unconscionable” at a July 11 congressional hearing, has helped 100 constituents with passport problems.
Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., has helped 240 families, including Matt Stuart. When Stuart’s passport hadn’t arrived 15 weeks after applying, his fiancee got 200 people to e-mail Sarbanes with the subject line, “Save Matt Stuart’s honeymoon!”
Sarbanes’ staff got a July 17 appointment for Stuart at a passport office, and he hopes to get the passport in time for a July 19 departure for Venice.
“Otherwise we’ll be honeymooning in Ocean City, Maryland,” said the bride, Crystalyn Thienpont, who directs “word-of-mouth services” at MGH Advertising in Owings Mills, Md.
“I’m glad that we could help the honeymooners - which we obviously would have done regardless of the e-mails,” Sarbanes said.
• You can pay a private expediter. Some 200 private companies are authorized by the State Department to obtain passports on behalf of others, according to Robert Smith, director of the National Association of Passport and Visa Services. NAPVS represents 20 of the largest expediters, handling hundreds of thousands of passport applications a year.
Each company is allotted a quota of daily appointments at passport offices. But they can’t fish your passport out of the bureaucracy if you’ve already applied, unless you cancel your original application and start the process over.
Demand for expediting services has increased, but the number of applications individual expediters are allowed to submit has decreased, Smith said.
“Every day we’re turning away people,” said Smith. “We’re not able to serve everyone who’s looking for help.”
CIBT Inc., the nation’s largest expediter with offices in seven cities, charges $174 to get a passport in four days or more, and $254 for a “super-rush emergency,” said spokesman Steven Diehl. “We’ve seen a 50 percent increase in passport work during the first six months of 2007, and we’ve nearly doubled our call volume.”
CIBT deals mostly with tour operators and corporate clients, but has been able to accommodate most requests from the public, Diehl said.
The State Department expects nearly 18 million passport applications this year, up from 12.1 million last year. The agency hired extra staff and ordered diplomats home with a goal of “reducing passport turnaround time to normal levels by the end of the year,” said Harty. “The passport situation is a top priority at the State Department, and we are devoting resources and personnel to getting back on track.”
(Article from Yahoo)
This article is a fairly accurate reporting of the actual situation of firms like A Briggs and their dealings with the Passport Agency.
Before the passport problems of this year, we would routinely tell persons calling us because they needed a passport that they didn’t need to use us if they were leaving in four weeks or more. Now, we are never sure exactly what to tell callers, because there have been so many problems reported to us.
Here is the article from the Houston Post:
Buggs:
Fast route to passport paved with cash
By SHANNON BUGGS
Throw money at the problem.
That seems to be the only workable solution to the passport mess the federal government made.
Rules that went into effect in January require all U.S. citizens to have passports to leave and re-enter the U.S. by airplane.
So travelers, used to flying to Mexico, Canada, Bermuda and Caribbean nations using only a driver’s license and birth certificate, flooded regional passport offices with applications.
The backlog is so deep, the application processing time has doubled from the usual six weeks to 12, although the State Department says it will whittle it down to eight weeks by fall.
Key receipt takes time
Earlier this month, the State Department relaxed the rules temporarily.
Until September, air travelers to these major tourist destinations can continue using their licenses and birth certificates as proof of identity as long as they present a receipt confirming that a passport application has been filed.
Although you can download that receipt from the State Department Web site, it could take as long as 10 business days from the time you submit the application to when you can print the receipt.
That catch — the receipt processing time — is a detail many travelers have overlooked.
But in the same amount of time, if you pay about double the usual passport fees, you could have your actual passport and not a piece of paper saying it’s on its way.
What expediters do
For fees of $100 to $200, expediters, also known as courier services or passport and visa firms, handle much of the legwork for passport applications.
That cost is tacked on to the $60 the government charges for expedited service and the passport application, as well as execution fees of: $67 for a renewal; $97 for a first-time passport for anyone age 16 or older; and $82 for those under age 16.
Adult passports are good for 10 years and children’s for five.
“One thing that I have seen a lot of lately is people contacting their local Congress people for support and assistance,” said Steve Diehl, vice president of business development for CIBT, the nation’s largest expediter. “And a lot of senators and Congress people have been calling us to help to get passports released. That never used to happen. That’s really unheard-of.”
‘By the rules’
The reason expediters can get done what you can’t is they don’t have to call the automated appointment number to schedule times with passport agents. The firms register with the State Department to act as authorized representatives for citizens, and their sensitive personal documents, and are allotted a set number of appointment times to handle their clients’ business.
“We go by the rules,” said Maria Lowe, owner of Wide World Visas, a passport agency and expediter in downtown Houston. “We represent people who are waiting in line like everyone else, but we do the footwork and spend the waiting time.”
And the rules as established by the State Department are that each of the 15 regional passport agencies determines the number of appointment times that will be reserved for expediters, said
Steve Royster, a consular affairs spokesman.
“They allow us to submit 25 cases a day,” Lowe said of the Houston passport agency. “Out of those cases, we can only have three rushes that can be obtained in 24 hours. I can get you a passport on a regular basis in about two weeks.”
Because Diehl’s international firm has outlets in seven of the U.S.
cities with passport offices, it keeps a database of all its appointment allotments and advises its mostly corporate customers to send passport paperwork to the office with the appropriate availability.
Of all the passport agencies, Diehl said Seattle and New York “continue to be relatively easy to work with. They pretty much have kept it together through all of this crisis.”
Businesses feel crunch
The bureaucratic breakdown is starting to affect more than vacationers, he said, generating many new corporate clients for CIBT, including an airline based in Atlanta.
“Pilots are not being able to fly scheduled flights because they can’t get their passports renewed on time,” Diehl said. “A lot of business is starting to be jeopardized by staffers not being able to get their passports turned around quickly. That’s an ongoing horror story that we are starting to see every day.”
Now, you know Fortune 500 companies are not about to lose out on millions of dollars of revenue to save a few pennies on getting passports processed. And neither should you.
Throw money at this problem to prevent canceling or delaying your vacation or business trip. You shouldn’t have to, but the federal government really hasn’t given you a choice in the matter.
Columnist Shannon Buggs has completed the personal finance planning certificate program at the University of Houston. Contact her at shannon.buggs@chron.com.
Brought to you by the HoustonChronicle.com
The Passport Agency is paying refunds to passport applicants who paid the government $60 expedite fee and didn’t receive their passports in a timely manner. If this happened to you, by all means apply for the refund, but expect to wait several months to receive a response.
Here is the article:
Govt. to refund travelers whose passports weren’t expedited
Updated
By Devlin Barrett, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON — Frustrated travelers who paid an extra $60 to get their U.S. passports expedited — and still had to wait for them — can now get a refund from the government.
The decision to refund the money, disclosed in a State Department document sent Tuesday to members of Congress, represents the latest effort to come to grips with a massive backlog in passport applications that has ruined or delayed summer vacation plans for thousands in the United States.
The delays were largely due to a new rule that requires U.S. citizens to have passports when flying to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda. Last week, the government announced it was suspending that rule until September, as long as travelers to those countries carried a printout receipt showing they had applied for a passport.
The passport delays were so bad that many of those who paid for faster service, at a cost of $60 plus the regular processing fees of $97 for a new passport, did not receive their passports within the expected 14 days. Some who paid extra waited for a month or more.
“It’s an outrage to pay over $150 for a passport and still have your travel plans ruined,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who had previously called for the refunds.
Schumer also chided State officials for not doing more to publicize the refunds, saying they should be “shouting this refund policy from the rooftops, not whispering it in the wind.”
The State Department document, obtained by The Associated Press, says passport applicants who paid for, but did not get, expedited service should send a written refund application to the agency’s refund office in Washington. They should provide their passport number, if available, their name, date and place of birth, the approximate date they applied for the passport, as well as a mailing address and phone number.
Homeland Security officials have warned that the passport delays will not affect their schedule of requiring passports of everyone driving across the border into Canada or Mexico beginning in January 2008 — a rule that some experts believe will lead to a fourfold increase in new demand for passports.