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Aspiring travelers in Mexico City were waiting about 750 days in Bogota, Colombia, it was 801 days. Those in Sao Paulo could plan on waiting more than 600 days. On a day in June, people in New Delhi could expect to wait 451 days for a visa interview, according to the website. "As a society gets richer," says Zagorsky, "the people in that society say, 'I want to visit the rest of the world.'"įOR AMERICANS AND OTHERS ABROAD, IT'S NO PICNIC EITHERĪt U.S. Americans, it turns out, are on the move. passports per American has soared from about three per 100 people in 1989 to nearly 46 per 100 people in 2022. passports has grown at roughly 10% faster than the population over the past three decades, according to Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Boston University's Questrom School of Business.Īfter passport delays derailed his own plans to travel to London earlier this year, Zagorsky found that the number of U.S. and Mississippi, according to the Government Printing Office.īut the number of Americans holding valid U.S. Now, passports are processed at centers around the country and printed at secure facilities in Washington, D.C. It was 1952 when a law required, for the first time, passports for every U.S. Reddit published eye-watering diaries, some more than 1,000 words long, of application dates, deposits submitted, contacts made, time on hold, money spent and appeals for advice. Facebook and WhatsApp groups bristled with reports of bewilderment and fury. Passport applicants lit up social media groups, toll-free numbers and lawmakers' phone lines with questions, appeals for advice and cries for help. He said the department is hiring agents as quickly as possible, opening more appointments and trying to address the crisis in other ways. When demand for travel all but disappeared during the pandemic, he said, the government let contractors go and reassigned staff that had been dedicated to handling passports.Īround the same time, the government also halted an online renewal system "to make sure that we can fine tune it and improve it," Blinken said. "With COVID, the bottom basically dropped out of the system," Antony Blinken told a House subcommittee March 23. secretary of state had an answer, of a sort.

"We'll still be okay," she thought.īy March, concerned travelers began asking for answers and then demanding help, including from their representatives in the House and Senate, who widely reported at hearings this year that they were receiving more complaints from constituents on passport delays than any other issue. Then the State Department upped the wait time for a regular passport to as much as 13 weeks.

"Plenty of time," Collier recalled thinking. They'd have their passports a month before they needed them. The clerk, she said, estimated wait times at eight to 11 weeks. It was early March when Dallas-area florist Ginger Collier applied for four passports ahead of a family vacation at the end of June. 'PLENTY OF TIME' TO 'WE'LL STILL BE OK' TO BIG PROBLEMS passport, prepare for an unplanned excursion into the nightmare zone. So, 2023 traveler, if you still need a valid U.S.

For everyone else, the options are few and expensive. Stories from applicants and interviews by The Associated Press depict a system of crisis management, in which the agencies are prioritizing urgent cases such as applicants traveling for reasons of "life or death" and those whose travel is only a few days off. The deluge is on-track to top last year's 22 million passports issued, the State Department says. That's left the passport agency flooded with a record-busting 500,000 applications a week. They're blaming the epic wait times on lingering pandemic -related staffing shortages and a pause of online processing this year. officials aren't even denying the problem or predicting when it will ease.