With the start of the school holidays and the final matches of the Rugby World Cup, thousands of people are planning a trip to France in the next few days.
04.10.2023 - 14:31 / forbes.com / Joe Biden
Good news, travelers: Passport processing times have decreased by two weeks since summer. It now takes eight to 11 weeks for routine processing and five to seven weeks for expedited processing, according to an update this week from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs.
Note that the average processing time doesn’t include the typical two-week “mailing time” on each end, a euphemism meaning the time that your application might be in transit or sitting in a pile on someone’s desk. So realistically, a traveler should budget 15 weeks for a routine passport renewal.
The passport renewal process takes much longer than it did before the pandemic, when six to eight weeks for routine service was the norm and, if you ponied up an extra $60 for expedited service, you might get your little blue book in as few as two weeks.
Lengthier-than-normal passport wait times have been fueled by Americans’ growing wanderlust. Over the past decade, the U.S. State Department has often struggled to keep up with soaring demand for international travel. In the first six months of 2023, 46.6 million Americans traveled outside the United States, according to data from the National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO), the agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce that tracks tourism statistics. That’s a 32% jump compared to the same period last year.
So where are Americans going in post-pandemic times? The better question is: where aren’t they going? In the first half of the year, more than 9.3 million Americans traveled to Europe, up 43% compared to the same timeframe in 2022. Over 5.6 million U.S. travelers went to the Caribbean (up 22%), 17.6 million headed to Mexico (up 12%) and 5.2 million went to Canada (up 72%). Between January and June 2023, American outbound travel was up 172% to Oceania and up a staggering 227% to Asia, compared to early 2022.
The number of U.S. passports issued in 2022 was up 63% compared to a decade ago. Between October 2022 and September 2023 (the federal fiscal year), the State Department issued more than 24 million passport books and cards, the most ever in our nation’s history.
“Our dedicated staff have worked countless hours to reduce passport processing times,” the State Department said in a press release. “We are continuously reassessing our operations to maximize efficiencies and are introducing innovations to our customer service and processing models.”
In December 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that promised to bring key government agencies into the digital era and decrease the red tape for a broad array of services, including passport renewals.
Soon afterward, the State Department began piloting a limited release of an online passport renewal service
With the start of the school holidays and the final matches of the Rugby World Cup, thousands of people are planning a trip to France in the next few days.
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