Some of you may have seen a sneak peak of my super fat looking passport in a post from earlier today… well, here it is again!
I was starting to run a little low on pages, and still have quite a bit of traveling planned this year. Plus, those full page visas eat up space fast! I knew I was going to run out of pages by early next year at the latest, so my two options were to get a new passport, or to add passport pages. Since my passport is still valid for over 6 years, that was kind of a no-brainer.
However, Rapid Travel Chai reports that starting in 2016 you will no longer be able to add extra pages to your passport after initial issuance.
The longest amount of time I will be home for the rest of the year consecutively is about 3 weeks, so regular service is not an option, and even doing the normal mail expedited service made me kind of nervous, so I decided to take my passport into an agency.
Detroit is the closest agency to me, so I signed up for an appointment time and headed in. It was a pretty painless process, I had to check in and they made up my application was filled out correctly, then I went up to another window to hand everything over. I don’t think they get many people who are asking for a double extension of pages… they guy kept asking me if I was sure I wanted that many 😛 I had the option to come back to pick my passport up, or to have it mailed to me, and I elected to have it mailed to me since it was estimated by the end of the week (which gave me a whole week of buffer, this stay home is only 2 weeks). The passport ended up arriving back to me just two days later!
Cost: $82 for new pages, $60 expedite fee, $14.85 shipping
When you go into an agency you always have to pay the expedite fee. Some agencies require proof of travel to process your application there, but Detroit does not require that. If it is an absolute emergency, some agencies can process applications even faster (like, that day), but you definitely will need proof of travel if you are asking for that.
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Be very careful with the binding on that with multiple sets of extra pages. I was on a multi-country trip in 2009 when I attempted to enter Australia and they wanted to deny me entry because the top corner binding was beginning to separate from the overall pages. Basically, it looked exactly like yours does now. Because I was coming from New Zealand and headed to Hong Kong next, they couldn’t send me back to the US (which is what they told me the would do normally with documents that looked to be coming apart) so they admitted me but I couldn’t leave until I got a new passport. It was December 31 and I was scheduled to fly out before the US Consulate reopened again so I spent most of that day running around getting a temporary passport – and then had to hassle with a new passport again when I got homet. From this point forward, I will just get a new passport issued when I get past one set of extension pages (although I also now get the larger passport to start with). US passports are just not as sturdy as their counterparts. 🙁
That sounds like quite the hassle. Hopefully my passport can keep itself together for the next few years until it is time to renew! I’m generally very careful with it, but I’ll make sure to be even more so with the extra pages. I think in the photo my passport might look worse than it is, because the pages that got added are actually a slightly different size than my original pages, so they don’t quite line up correctly.