by Laura Anderson, Mom & loyal Huffman Travel client

As travel options open again, you should be prepared to take advantage of opportunities to travel abroad. It pays to check all your documents as soon as possible and secure renewed passports, if necessary. Passports need to be valid 6 months after your trip for most destinations, but be sure to check the specific rules for countries you intend to visit.  

As with many other operations, the pandemic has slowed down the U.S. Department of State Passport Agency. Reduced staff levels and restricted procedures mean that nearly 1 million applications are in backlog as of this writing. And, to their great frustration, the private expediters that could help renew passports in hours to days are mostly subjected to the same limitations. While things will change as the economy opens, demand is expected to continue to outstrip supply. So, submitting your renewals right away can allow you to get expedited service and buy you peace of mind. Here’s how: 

Visit travel.state.gov and follow instructions for expedited service of 4-6 weeks - regular service is 10-12 weeks. It is strongly recommended that you visit a post office to submit your application if you are in the need for speed. This currently may require an appointment secured through the website. When you appear to submit your renewals, make sure to tell the agent that you want to send the application using overnight service (with tracking number), and that you want to pay for the overnight service for the return as well. This alone could save you days to weeks in the process. Importantly, it also offers you some additional options for tracking your applications. 

Need your passport back faster? In this case, you have a couple of options:

-          If you are having an emergency such as a death on the family, the State Department provides a process for you and instructions are on the website.

-          If your issue is simply that you would like to travel for business or pleasure (and you have less than 14 days to renew) you are in competition for relatively few appointments at the handful of Passport Offices in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles among others. Winning one of these appointments can be like winning the lottery, so best to get some help. Who do you call?  What is not universally known is that each member of Congress has a person or persons responsible for helping their constituents to navigate Federal agencies and processes. This includes passport renewal processes. Commonly known as Constituent Relations, these intrepid folks can’t make the process go away, but they try to move it faster. You should be able to find a link to yours through the website of your U.S. Representative, but you can certainly call the office as well.   

In our case, while our efforts to get an appointment in the Passport Office did not work out, submitting the USPS tracking numbers of the outbound applications to our Constituent Relations experts in our District resulted in receipt of our new passports in 9 days. That felt rather incredible at the time! Please do not assume however that by following the process above, you can expect to receive your passports back this fast. There are many factors at play for every new application. 

Once you receive your new passports, don’t forget to update your TSA/Global Entry accounts with information from your new passports.  If your Global Entry cards are set to expire soon, you may want to start that process right away too. If you submit the renewal before expiration, the CBP gives you 6 months past expiration to continue to use the cards while the process is underway. 

Hopefully, your renewals will go more quickly and smoothly as everything reopens. Even if they don’t, please be sure to offer encouragement to all the people who help you along the way. The restrictions introduced at their agencies made their jobs of serving us all efficiently much harder and complaints more frequent. They’ll appreciate the support of your good words!