News on U.S. Passports

If you are going to apply to add extra pages before the deadline, you can have two sets of 24 pages added for the same price as one set! To do so, you need to check the box at the top of the application.

Thanks, Stan, for the news that the US State Department will no longer issue extra pages to an existing passport after Dec. 31 of this year.  I had read about that earlier this year, but had completely forgotten about it until your message here reminded me.  Although my current passport (issued 02 Oct 2014) was 52-pages, half of them were already filled with visa stamps just 14 months into the life of the passport (it doesn't take much these days for that to happen, when many visa stamps take up a full page).  At that rate my passport would not have made it through calendar year 2016 and I had fears that it would run out of pages at an inopportune time, possibly on a trip itself.  So on Dec. 3, 2015 I applied for 2 sets of additional pages of 24 pages each.  The application said it takes from 4-6 weeks for the passport to be processed with the extra pages, but I received it back yesterday (Dec. 19, 2015), which was just about 2 weeks (not including overnight delivery on both ends).  So hopefully my now 90+ page passport should be good for at least 5 years.  But based on my previous passport (the one that expired in 2014), there are some downsides to having such a thick passport.  It no longer fit through most automated airline check-in kiosks at airports and it required a certain amount of finagling to get it to fit into the US Global Entry kiosks.  Plus two trips to Iran in 2010 and 2014 where Iranian immigration personnel painstakingly went through every single page to make sure I didn't have an Israeli stamp in my passport before they allowed me entry.  Thus I view my newly expanded passport the same way I viewed my previous passport, as more of a liability than an advantage.  I have to keep a rubber band around it because it no longer closes properly.  Nonetheless, I just couldn't see getting a whole new passport after only 14 months, so I repeated the same mistake I made last time by getting the additional pages.  But one thing we can say for certain is that it was my last opportunity to make such a mistake.

Why do immigration officials stamp a passport on random pages? They're all over the place! Last trip I tried to control it, but they ignored my markers and used a fresh page. My OCD tendencies would like to have my trips in order and tidily stamped in my passport. I guess this is a forlorn hope?