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The State Department has never been as behind in processing passport requests as it has since the pandemic. At first they were slow because no one was allowed to work in their offices; that led to a huge backlog. They eventually got through all those applications, but meanwhile, the State Dept is still seeing record numbers of passport applications…so they’re still behind. And so a process that took 4 to 6 weeks (including USPS mailing back and forth) 5 years ago is taking 10 to 13 weeks to process (not including USPS time on either end), or 7 to 9 weeks expedited.

I mean, it’s gotten to the point where one guy, waiting for months for his passport to come in the mail, took 2 planes the day before his international flight, just to get a passport. And then there was that genius but morally gray travel hack some people had been doing to get their passports quickly.

But let’s say you don’t have an international trip coming up for months, and are just waiting for your passport to go through the system. In reading a variety of travel-related message groups, I’ve seen a big difference in how long people say it’s taken them to get their new or renewed passports. Some have been waiting in apparent limbo for 4 months, while others boast they got theirs, not expedited, in half (or even less!) that amount of time. And there never seemed to be any rhyme or reason for it.

Apparently, there may be more of a pattern than, “I guess they hate me LOL.” or “dumb luck.” Delays might be based on what state the applicant lives in.

MarketWatch is a website that provides financial information, business news, analysis, and stock market data. Their team recently analyzed Google Trends and search engine data to determine if people in different states were affected more or less by passport delays in 2023.

Their Methodology

From Marketwatch:

National search volume data for this report comes from Glimpse, a research platform that tracks trending topics across the internet. To find the states with the most travelers stressed about passport delays, we used Google Trends data from August 2022 through July 2023.

Google Trends is a tool that allows users to compare search terms to discover how popular they are at a certain time and against other terms. Google presents data for each term on a scale of 0 to 100. We analyzed 10 terms relating to passport delays to see what was most searched for in each region. The terms we analyzed are as follows:

• “Passport renewal status”
• “Check passport status”
• “How long to renew passport”
• “Expedite passport”
• “Passport office”
• “Passport appointment near me”
• “How long to get passport”
• “Get passport fast”
• “Rush my passport”
• “Same day passport locations”

These figures were then normalized by comparing them to the anchor word “flight.” This word served as a control variable, preventing places and terms with the most search volume from ranking the highest. The final score we ranked represents how popular passport searches were relative to the control term (flight). We then found the highest score for each state.

Their findings

A. Passport demand

It’s one thing to say there’s been an uptick in the number of passport requests. It’s another to see how the trend has been from pre-Covid days until now.

B. The top and bottom 10

The 10 states where Americans seemed to have more delays in receiving their passport were:

1. California
2. North Carolina
3. Georgia
4. Texas
5. Pennsylvania
6. New York
7. Tennessee
8. New Jersey
9. Maryland
10. Virginia

The 10 states where there seemed to be fewer delays to get passports were:

1. Wyoming
2. North Dakota
3. South Dakota
4. Hawaii
5. Montana
6. Alaska
7. Vermont
8. Rhode Island
9. New Mexico
10. Nebraska

This interactive map shows all the states (and Washington D.C.) and where they rank in passport delays:

Our thoughts

I like the study. But there are a couple of things that make me say "hmmm":

1. The delay doesn't appear to be based on where your passport gets mailed.

• If you're renewing and you live in CA (#1 for delays), FL (#18), IL (#14), MN (#31), NY (#6) or TX (#4), you're supposed to mail your application to a address in Irving, Texas.
• If you live in any other state, or want your passport expedited, it gets mailed to Philadelphia, PA (and yet, PA is #5 in the country for delays).

Even if passport applications get forwarded on to Passport Processing Centers (there are over two dozen of them scattered around the country) after they're received in TX or PA, we don't know which one a person's passport gets forwarded to (the State Dep't specifies: "All online passport renewal applications begin with "95." You will not be able to use the locator number to determine which agency is working on your application."). So it's possible some Passport Processing Centers work faster than others for reasons we don't know, and we also don't know which those are. That wouldn't be highlighted in Marketwatch's study.

2. If they're going by how popular certain search terms are, wouldn't state population come into play, as well? I mean, California (#1 for delays) has nearly 40 million residents. The population of Wyoming (#50 for delays) has less than 600,000 people living there. So it would make sense that significantly more people in CA were looking up passport info, simply because they have almost 67 times the population of WY.

Further potential evidence of state population potentially affecting searches: of the 10 states that seem to have the most delays, the top 6 (CA, NC, GA, TX, PA and NY) are also in the top 10 states based on population.

And of the 10 states that have the least amount of delays, 7 of them (WY, ND, SD, MT, AK, VT and RI) are in the bottom 10 states based on population.

Of course, if they compared each search term to the number of people in each state and their ranks were based on a percentage of the population, then it would make more sense.

3. This goes side by side with population, but a whole lot more people fly internationally out of California, North Carolina and Georgia than Wyoming and the Dakotas every day. More people flying internationally = more people needing a passport.

The Marketwatch study is definitely a fun one to look at; if nothing else, it makes you feel a kind of vindication about waiting for so long ;-). But I'm not sure how well it reflects who's waiting how long for their passport, based on where they live.

Here's a link to the rest of the info they shared from the study.

Feature Photo: imgflip meme generator

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