Will the 3rd Time be the Charm for Our Global Entry Interview?

Remember way back in January when one of our biggest travel gripes was how hard it was to get a Global Entry interview.  I wrote a post on Applying for Global Entry as I began the process on January 18th.  Funny how I thought I had it all figured out…..then came the corona virus.

Because we weren’t taking any international trips last year, I thought that I was smart waiting until January to apply.  Since Global Entry costs $100 every 4 years, I figured we would get more value by waiting until we were going to start using it.  We were planning to travel to Portugal in September, so I figured that getting the application started in January would give us plenty of time to get through the process.

Some friends of mine started their application about a week before we did.  They were able to get an interview appointment in February and complete their enrollment.  Lucky dogs!  What a difference a week makes. The soonest appointment I could get at the same location was March 20.  That still would have given us plenty of time to complete the enrollment process before our trip in September, except our interview ended up being the very week that everything shut down.

I calmly logged into the website and figured out how to reschedule our interview.  Not knowing how long things would be shut down, I blindly set an appointment for June 18th.  At that point I was still hopeful for our trip to Portugal and that we would still be able to complete the Global Entry process in time.

Since then we have decided to postpone our Portugal trip until September of 2021.  It seems like the best course of action. With things as scary as they are right now, I am not in a hurry to travel to that extent.  But we still intended to go through with the Global Entry process because we were already at the last step and had paid the application fees of $100 each.  With our Stay at Home order in Michigan due to expire on June 12, we should still be able to make that June 18 appointment.

Tuesday of this week we each received an e-mail from the Global Entry program telling us that they had cancelled our June 18 appointment because they will remain closed until July 6th.  My only urgency in getting this done is that the interview portion of the process has to be completed within a year of the application or we have to start the process all over.  Time is ticking.  Yesterday I logged into the website intending to reschedule our appointments.  I was able to get all the way through to the last step before it gave me an error code and would not complete my appointment.  Because I don’t give up easily, I tried again this morning, but it still gave me the same error.

I was beginning to get a little discouraged.  This afternoon I tried for a 3rd time to reschedule our appointments.  I could tell right away that something had changed on the website.  It now listed our appointment as Cancelled and gave me the option to Schedule an appointment instead of Rescheduling a current appointment.  I was hopeful as I went through the motions and this time I was successful in landing us both an appointment for July 16th.  Realistically, I wanted to go even later into the year, but for some reason the only available appointments listed were in July.

Fingers crossed that this 3rd Interview appointment actually happens.  Maybe since it took me 3 times to get the appointment rescheduled, 3 will be my lucky number.