1 week Ago
DALLAS — It’s time to play it back and reminisce about my Spring Break 2024. It was a great trip to Europe, mainly to Switzerland, that included the awe-inspiring Matterhorn. This is going to sound a little dorky, but how I got to that storied mountain was also amazing.
I was driving, and there were big mountains in the way. According to my mapping app, it was going to take five hours to get around them or half that time to take the tunnel option with a "car transport." I wasn’t sure what that second option meant, but it sounded interesting.
It was. It consisted of me driving onto an open-air train, turning off my car and sitting in it while the locomotive blasted me and my car 21.5 miles through a mountain.
It was hauling. It only took about 20 minutes. I thought a lot about that train ride when I got back home, particularly while I was standing in the DFW airport customs line, which was demoralizingly long.
I think it took me about an hour to get past the checkpoint. That would have been enough time to take three train rides through that Swiss mountain! It was right then that I decided I needed Global Entry . That’s the government program where you pay a fee and U.
S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) researches you and then interviews you. If they determine you are a low-risk traveler, they can approve you for a Global Entry card that gives you expedited entry when you come back into the U.
S. It costs $120, but some travel reward credit cards will reimburse you for the fee. I got mine, and after spring break 2025, I sailed through customs in about a minute this time.
I am sorry to brag about that to the many people who have paid the non-refundable $120 fee and have gotten their conditional approval from CBP but are waiting a very long time to be granted their interview, which is required before they can be approved for Global Entry. Someone I know was told it would be a couple of months, so they waited. They inquired again recently and were told it could be 12 to 14 months to get their interview scheduled.
CBP insists to me that this isn’t because of budget or staffing cuts or the shift in Trump administration priorities. They say they’re still just catching up after COVID-19 and that average wait times for Global Entry interviews are 6 to 12 months. But there’s a workaround if you have paid the Global Entry fee, gotten conditional approval and are just waiting for the interview.
The next time you travel internationally, come back into the country and go through that maybe awful customs line — when you get to the front and hand them your passport, ask for Global Entry “enrollment on arrival” and they say they will give you your interview right there on the spot. CBP assures me they will do that if you ask. I was tempted to be skeptical about that, but I also doubted that whole "car transport" concept in Switzerland, and that turned out to be legit (and much faster).
Note: If you are one of those people who gets to the airport way in advance of your flight, in just a few locations, you can also ask for a Global Entry “enrollment on departure” interview and knock out that final interview step before your flight takes off..
