Traveling the World

Do you need to leave the country in the next 48 hours? Don’t have a passport? Or has your passport expired? Because of your situation, it’s simply just impossible for you to apply for a passport and have it routinely processed. With current passport processing times of four to six weeks, a routine passport application obviously isn’t an option.

In family emergencies, you wouldn’t be able to wait that long for your passport to arrive. This applies to family emergencies where you’ll need to travel out of the country as soon as possible. Good thing there’s an option for you to get a passport faster than is regularly allowed. For family emergencies, you’ll need an emergency passport.

Emergency passports are issued to US citizens who have family emergencies outside the country and have to leave within the next 48 hours. So, if you need a passport quickly, an emergency passport is what you need. Applying for one ensures that you’ll be able to leave the country immediately.

But just how do you apply for an emergency passport? It starts with a phone call that you’ll need to make to the National Passport Information Agency (NPIA). Tell them about your situation, and they will help you set an appointment with the passport office nearest you. The passport office will then be the one to take care of your emergency passport application.

In case the NPIA is unable to schedule an appointment for you, simply hang on the line. You will then be forwarded to a customer service representative (CSR). In turn, the CSR will handle your call and provide you with options on how you can get your emergency passport.

What if you don’t really need to travel within the next 48 hours? You have the option of just having your passport application expedited instead. As far as processing speeds go, an expedited option sits in between the routine passport application and the emergency passport.

The expedited passport option is a kind of a value-added service. And because of this, your passport application will be given priority over the routine passport applications. Thus expedited passports are a lot faster to process. And as a value-added service, you can expect an expedited passport to have an extra fee added to the regular passport application fees you need to pay. This is a non-issue, of course, if you need to get your passport quickly and don’t want to break a sweat doing it.

At times when you are faced with a family emergency, you’ll always have the option to apply for an emergency U.S. passport. Emergency us passport cut the waiting time for passport applications so that you can be with your loved ones outside the country as soon as possible. Now if you can wait for two to three weeks to have your application processed, you can always have it expedited.

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