My mom and I visited the following European countries: Iceland, France, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, and Denmark. We were on a Royal Caribbean ship with more than 3,000 passengers and crew, each of whom needed to go through a security screening process (metal detectors for humans; X-ray for bags) every day upon returning to the ship. During our three weeks in Europe, which included the cruise and three intra-European flights, the longest that we ever waited in a line was about 10 minutes. Then we came back to Logan Airport here in Boston. Our Icelandair 757-200 (flying like Donald Trump!) landed before 7 pm on August 6. We were early so our gate wasn’t ready and we sat on a taxiway for about 30 minutes. Then we entered a sea of humanity waiting for passport clearance. Mom is 82 years old and had ordered a wheelchair so we bypassed more than 1000 people and got into a line for “diplomats and wheelchairs” adjacent to the flight crew line. There we waited for about 25 minutes behind perhaps 7 family groups. Next to us and proceeding at the same pace was a British Airlines long-haul 747 crew. These folks travel every month to every corner of globe. Was this kind of line typical for Boston? “It is always like this,” responded a flight attendant, “but LA is a lot worse. The U.S. is the slowest and most disorganized country in the world now, but LA makes Boston look efficient.”
When we got to the front of the line, instead of the all-business approach taken by the unsmiling Russian immigration agents in St. Petersburg, the Department of Homeland Security (annual budget: $41 billion) agent chatted amiably with us. She was quite pleasant, but had already processed our passports and the result was a further delay for the folks behind us.
When we got to the baggage carousel I was feeling relieved about having skipped out on most of the wait. But our bags weren’t there. An hour after we’d landed. Then I realized that the baggage folks were likely accounting for the fact that the typical passenger would need at least one hour after arriving at the gate to get through passport control. Thus there was no point in having bags pile up on the carousel. They would then need to have extra people to come into the terminal and pull them off the carousel into a big heap. So mom and I waited another roughly 45 minutes before the bags from our flight began to arrive (a friend who is a Global Entry customer says that he seldom saves any time because he always needs to check a bag and when the system is backed up the bags take an extra hour or two to arrive; he just waits in a different part of the airport than if he did not have Global Entry). There are no bathrooms in this part of the airport, presumably because nobody imagined that travelers would be hanging out in this area for multiple hours. A European grumbled that “In Zurich this whole process takes 15 minutes from the time you land.”
Once we did get our bags, there was a line of about 400 people trying to get out. There were at least four DHS agents near the exit, but only two were taking the customs forms and waving people out. The other two were sitting chatting and waiting next to an X-ray machine in case anyone was flagged for an exception. During the 45 minutes that we waited I didn’t see this happen. If they had joined their colleagues they probably could have cleared out the backlog in 15 minutes, but instead they sat. idle.
We left the terminal with our bags roughly 2.25 hours after landing. The wheelchair guy pushed my mom all the way into the parking lot. He had been with us for 1.5 hours so I gave him a $20 bill (“for half of your next visit to Starbucks”) and he seemed happy.
[If you travel with only carry-on bags and would like to try to speed things up with Global Entry, the Customs folks are conducting interviews at Logan Airport. The next available time slot is in April 2017.]
Pretty much everyone I know avoids business travel to the US whenever possible.
Next time, take Aer Lingus. You will clear US Immigration and Customs in Dublin very smoothly and you will arrive in Boston as if on a domestic flight.
Similar experience travelling from Heathrow to San Francisco International, Washington Dulles; immigration appear to be taken completely by surprise at the arrival of a BA A380 which I assume makes the same trip daily at the same time. Staffing did not look equal to the passenger volume. At least in terms of wait time, Zimbabwe does better.
We traveled from Oakland to Heathrow and back this summer. The waits for customs and luggage at both ends was about the same. We spent about 20-30 minutes to clear customs and then another 20 minutes or so for our luggage pickup and the same for luggage check-in. Likewise we spent 30 minutes or so in the security check in both airports. But we got extra screening in Heathrow of my wife’s makeup bag that took 10 minutes more. Many people were getting extra screening for this to the chagrin of the security people.
So we spent about an hour each way total time. It seemed to us like the staffing in both places was OK.
The big issue I see is fuzzy rules on what items can be carried on and how it has to be packaged in plastic bags for security checking of carry on stuff.
PS.. We went on the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner both ways. Our flight took 10.5 hours (a long time in coach class) so we got to see how the plane does long haul flights. We really like this plane and seating setup. It is a lot quieter than other planes and more restful.
Could you have mailed your luggage back to the U.S.?
Here’s another datapoint for you, and a suggestion. If you have a smartphone, download CBP’s “Mobile Pass” app and use it. It lets you go through customs faster. Hardly anyone must use it because I’ve never waited more than 3 minutes to get through, while there’s often a line of non-app users (i.e., everyone else) waiting. I rarely check luggage, which is a factor. However just today, I arrived at DFW from another country, with checked luggage, and I was through immigration and had my luggage within maybe 10 minutes. I don’t qualify for global entry because of a conviction in the 90s.
Things quickly went south in DFW as thunderstorms closed the airport, causing 7+ hours of cascading delays, so I spent the day at the airport, but that’s weather for you.
Mark – I shipped 3 bags back from New Zealand in 2008 at ~$100/bag, then took a backpack of essentials on a week-long sailing trip in New Caledonia, spent 4 nights in LA then skiing in Colorado with friends on the way home. When I got home 2 weeks after shipping my bags, one of them was held up in US Customs because they wanted me to pay a duty (import tax) on some items I had taken to New Zealand from the US and was now bringing back to the US. Once I convinced them that I had purchased those items in the US, I finally got my last bag 3 weeks after I shipped it.
So, in short, it’s probably not a good idea to ship bags internationally to shorten customs times.
US TSA and Customs are generally slow and terrible (I inadvertently carried a camping knife in a backpack with me onto a plane once without realizing it until I arrived at my destination hotel, and TSA apparently didn’t notice) compared to the rest of civilization, and all anyone can really say about it is, “That’s just the way it is…”
It is not just airports.
We were crossing by land this spring via the “Peace Arch” crossing into the US south of Vancouver.
We all had Nexus passes, and after waiting in line about three minutes prior to the booth, the officer said “You’ve been randomly selected for secondary screening”. So, polite Canadians all, off we go.
Except the ENTIRE staff of the secondary screening centre is in some kind of meeting, in full view of about 50 people waiting to enter, including several groups of US travellers. We wait, and wait. The meeting lasted 45 minutes before anyone even came to the counter to do the interviews. We were over an hour getting out of the building, after presenting our “expedited travel” document.
Then we had to wait another half hour while they went over the vehicle.
This is a group of four aging middle class travellers on a weekend trip to Port Townsend, bringing MONEY for chrissakes, to spend in the US of A.
US Border Services has to figure out that they have both an enforcement AND a customer service role. I never travelled to the eastern bloc in the bad old days but it couldn’t have been much worse.
We only travel through the US by air now if there is no alternative.
To go over the previous points, shipping the bags doesn’t really work because those are examined to, and you run a big risk of losing lots of times trying to reclaim bags that have been confiscated. Our experience with returning to the US from Brazil has been pretty decent, probably because the flights are overnight flights and arrive very early in the morning. Things just seem less backed up if you do it that way, though there was an issue when we started doing this with the flights getting in about an hour before DHS started their work-day. Other than using overnight flights as much as possible, I don’t think there are any good workarounds, other than avoiding travelling to the US.
For some reason, from what I’ve seen from my experiences, and looking around the internets, crossing over the border with Canada seems to have become particularly bad. I’d like to see an explanation for this.
Chris… Shhhh
Don’t tell people about Mobile Pass! It won’t work for long if people learn about it.
Ed #9,
you are not alone with that impression. I haven’t been there myself, but had an occasion to watch a documentary film devoted to precisely that very problem: why has the USA-Canada border, for 200 years largely unguarded peaceful territory, become so impenetrable and hostile, esp. to the local populations there.
I don’t think that I’ll spoil it much for you by disclosing the filmmaker’s logical conclusion: after 2001-9-11, when the DHS set about fortifying also physical borders of the realm, the “Canada parts” of the border protection agencies that saw all these funds going South decided that they’re no Second Banana, and set about weaponizing their crossings beyond ALL reason. A federal spending spree like no other… fully comparable to that (rumored) of practically every county sheriff’s office now having an armoured Humvee at its disposal. In case of a terrorist strike in deepest backwater Alabama.
See the film trailer… I suppose it bears the title of “BorderLine,” also to play on the words of borderline personality disorder (while making it hard to find among all other so-named movies about the latter ;-))
BorderLine (2012) [4m41s] trailer
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=89IPNllPN6Y
A short video + another article also at
http://m.huffpost.com/ca/entry/3402435
Border patrol in the US is a national disgrace. We travelled in Europe this summer and waited about 5 minutes to enter in Amsterdam. When we arrived home in Oakland, we were lucky to have been near the front of the plane — and it still took us 45 minutes to get through…I can’t imagine how many hours the other 200 people had to wait.
My inner frustrated screenwriter returns constantly to an idea I once had, of a chartered plane full of top-notch lawyers going to a prestigious conference, but delayed at the airport and missing it because of some TSA bozo’s thinking it his day to earn brownie points towards his next promotion – and then these lawyers ganging up and suing everybody in sight for $hefty damages (Scott Turow script consultant). Because it seems that the only way to straighten the inefficient processing of human and luggage units at American airports is via such torts(?). Then I wake up & feel better already.
If you have Global Entry and are able to travel carry-on-only, you can be off the plane and out on the curb in 5-10 minutes flat, as I was on a recent arrival at BOS from LGW, also around 7pm.
The Global Entry interview schedule does get backed up, but the secret is to frequently check the scheduling calendar (at least a couple of times every day; it’s not that painful), and you will likely find a slot open up sooner due to someone else canceling their appointment. I went from filling out the initial online application to having my interview completed in about 2 weeks last fall (also at BOS). Or if you have any domestic travel plans, check to see if any of your domestic destination airports do interviews and what their schedules are like. Some cities have a much shorter wait time than others, for whatever reason.