Expedited Passport troubles.

I applied for a passport April 19th to go to Europe Jun 20th. I know it was late, but hey, I paid for expedited.

I just checked their online database and despite paying for expedited (Me and My GF), they are processings it as Routine. Now, this means we can't buy our tickets because they are non refundable and we cannot be guaranteed we will get our passports in time. Ontop of this, I WANT MY $60 back! (well, 120 for both of us). What a ripoff. Ridiculous. If we can't get through tomorrow or monday, we're going to have to replan within the U.S. or forget the whole thing all together.


Does anyone have any suggestions or helpful insights from personal experience? I'm REALLY mad about this. Especially since the guy at the post office wasn't exactly nice to my GF as well. GRRR.

This happened to my daughter. She had her tickets and her departure date was coming up. She had paid for an expedited passport which should have given her weeks to spare but no passport showed up so she had to go get it in person directly from the nearest Federal agency which could issue passports. For us this is the Federal building in West Los Angeles.

It was a tremendous hassle. It required (I think) her to leave for West LA at 4:00 AM for 3 days in a row so she could be in line by 6:00 AM to get serviced on that day; and some hassle occurred each day so it couldn't be completed that day and she had to come back the next day.

She found out that, whenever her appointment was for (she had called it in the day before), if she wasn't in line before 6:30 or so, the line at the doors got so long that she couldn't get in at all that day to make her appointment, no matter that she had one scheduled.

From her first call early Monday to find out the process (which was inaccurately reported to her) until she had a passport in hand took up 4 days of 12+ hours a day effort. She didn't have to pay anything more since she had her receipt for her original passport order, but as I said, it was a tremendous hassle.

When my son needed one, we ordered it I think 6 months in advance based on this experience; and while it came much later than promised, that was enough time. I'm told that it's much slower now due to many passport requests since passports are needed for Mexico and Canada now. The government now recommends giving yourself at least 5 months for them to process it. Based on my experience, I'd give them 9 months.

If you want to try to get your passport in person, you have to find out how far away the nearest federal agency issuing passports is (maybe in Phila). They are few and far between.

This probably doesn't help you, but I thought I'd share...

You might also wish to find a passport expiditing company (check with your travel agent for a few recommendations). In the past--many times it was worth the money just because they did it in one day and you would not have to stand in line (possibly for multiple days).

Don't know now since 9/11 if they are still a good deal.

-Bill

Why should some company with inside connections be needed to deal with our own government's agencies at additional cost to us? Why can't the agencies be more responsive to their 'customers'?

LED_Thrift said:

...Why can't the agencies be more responsive to their 'customers'?...

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Because the customers are not allowed to stop paying (their taxes) as a response to getting poor service...

I didn't check the US Passport progress database or anything, but when I asked (and paid for) expedited processing of my passport, they had it to and from Juneau, Alaska in four days. I was in the same shoes you're in (Trip to England) - I'm going to hope that yours is gonna do the same thing!

Thanks for the responses guys. That is very disheartening to hear about how long it took, your daughter to get it and the effort she had to go through. I don't think I could do that at the moment. School and finals until mid may then I'm doing my co-op full time. Your post does help me realize I should forget the trip and not buy the tickets :/

I saw those agencies last night while trying to research this fiasco and was dumbfounded how an independent company that charged extra could possibly get my passport pushed through in 2-4 days. How is THAT fair? I mean, I'm having trouble being completely outraged because I DID wait later than I should have, but I am outraged that they screwed up AND charged me $60 for . If I don't get my passport in an expedited manner, i'm going to be writing to my congress respresentative asking about my $60 (x2!). I know $60 isn't a LOT of money, but it is enough to matter when you're a student. Plus.....I dunno, just irks me. The government mismanages itself so badly and I already pay for it. The thought of giving them 'free money' boils my blood.

Sable said:

I didn't check the US Passport progress database or anything, but when I asked (and paid for) expedited processing of my passport, they had it to and from Juneau, Alaska in four days. I was in the same shoes you're in (Trip to England) - I'm going to hope that yours is gonna do the same thing!

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I doubt it. It has been over a week now. I'm glad you got yours so quickly, but i've been reading on the net about other people having the same problem we are. Seems it took them 8-10 weeks to get it. :/ Kinda stinks, we were going to visit a friend that was over there teaching right now. Free place to stay. We can't really go later in the summer because this is the only time that really worked out for us. :thumbsdow

If the passport clerk at the post office didn't flag your application as "Expedited" on the envelope it would probably have been processed as Routine. And even if their online database has your application incorrectly classified and it is actually being handed as Expedited, it would still take about two weeks to get it processed plus the mail transit time.

http://travel.state.gov/passport/get/processing/processing_1740.html

It's nice that they have appointments now. The one time that I screwed up and didn't realize my passport had expired, I had to go to the Passport Agency in San Francisco and had to wait there all day to get my passport renewed as I was flying out the following day. The commercial companies that offer the short notice service will make the trip to the regional office for you, with your documents, if you are unable or it is inconvenient for you to do so, but for that, you pay an additional fee for what you could do yourself. There's no special "connection", but they do have a window for the vendors of these service providers.

UPDATE Gosh, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I've since found out that the time to process an Expedited application is now in the neighborhood of 4 weeks or more. And with summer approaching, I'd suspect "more" may be the operative word. If you want to make sure that you have a passport before booking your flight, you might want to make an appointment to go to the regional passport office in your area. Though it is possible that they may not let you do that since you're not travelling in the next 14 days.

havand said:

I applied for a passport April 19th to go to Europe Jun 20th. I know it was late, but hey, I paid for expedited.

I just checked their online database and despite paying for expedited (Me and My GF), they are processings it as Routine. Now, this means we can't buy our tickets because they are non refundable and we cannot be guaranteed we will get our passports in time. Ontop of this, I WANT MY $60 back! (well, 120 for both of us). What a ripoff. Ridiculous. If we can't get through tomorrow or monday, we're going to have to replan within the U.S. or forget the whole thing all together.


Does anyone have any suggestions or helpful insights from personal experience? I'm REALLY mad about this. Especially since the guy at the post office wasn't exactly nice to my GF as well. GRRR.

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Update:

Passport arrived today. I'm actually surprised how quickly it came, but....why did they have the wrong service on their webpage! This nearly srewed up our entire trip. Hopefully the seats are still available. I'm going to have to look tomorrow. I went down to the postoffice today before i knew they had arrived and the woman there seemed confused and surprised when i told her what the situation was. She had no different telephone number to call the agency at or helpful words from experience. Kinda annoying when I paid them $30 to take my check, put it in an envelope and mail it in.

Congratulations. I hope the rest of your trip works out well.