Americans who travel internationally on a regular basis have come to love Global Entry. It’s the government-run program, active since 2008, that allows preapproved members to skip the densely packed immigration queue at the U.S. border and breeze into the country using a fast lane. Most times, Global Entry holders find themselves at the luggage belt even before their bags get there.
The $120 price of a first-time Global Entry membership, which lasts 5 years, is waived by some credit card issuers, making it effectively free to apply. Global Entry status even automatically comes with free TSA PreCheck (normally $78), which helps travelers skip the worst lines at security checkpoints on the way out of the country, too.
The problem with such a popular program, travelers have discovered, is the U.S. government can’t keep up with the number of people who want it. First-time applicants must initially be conditionally approved, and that can take anywhere from 2 weeks to a whole year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Even after that provisional approval, applicants must still have a face-to-face final interview to validate the last step of their approval. The meeting is painless enough to do, but excruciating to actually schedule. Global Entry interviews are only conducted at about 110 approved sites across the country (usually inside major airports) and some locations’ schedules are so jammed that there’s nothing available for up to a year. (Sorry ’bout it, Fort Lauderdale!)
Get a Global Entry interview with “Enrollment on Arrival”
Frommer’s has already covered one way a conditionally approved applicant can secure that final interview—even if there are no appointment slots for months at the applicant’s preferred airport interview center.
The method is called Global Entry Enrollment on Arrival, a loophole that the Trusted Traveler Program installed in order to process applications faster. As long as travelers have already filed for Global Entry and obtained the preliminary conditional approval, they can get their final interview done—without an appointment—when they happen to be flying back to the United States from another country.
Instead of getting in the regular passport control line after landing, conditionally approved Global Entry applicants can simply look for the signs for “Global Entry Enrollment on Arrival.” Those will lead to an official who will quickly ask the questions that would have been asked at a standard, scheduled interview. If all goes well, the applicant will be an official Global Entry member after that.
Bear in mind that not every airport with a Customs and Border Protection office offers Enrollment on Arrival, and opening times might not coincide with your flight’s arrival.
Find a Global Entry interview time using a paid service
For travelers who prefer to use the more traditional method and schedule an interview in advance, several services have cropped up to assist.
The concept behind these services is they scan the scheduling systems at the Global Entry enrollment centers 24/7 and instantly ping subscribers when a new slot has opened up. New appointments can unexpectedly crop up as late as a day ahead.
Open appointment slots go fast. Once you receive an alert for one, you have to be quick to grab it by logging into your account at the Global Entry website. Since none of these services can make the booking for you, your chances of getting the timing right are likely to be better if the newest alerts come to you by urgent text.
Appointment Scanner, which costs $29 for 30 days, lets subscribers pick three enrollment centers (from the full list of centers) that they’d like to monitor. The service will send up to 25 alerts a day, depending on how many slots the system finds. The subscription doesn’t renew, so if you score that white whale appointment during your first month (as many users do), you won’t need to re-up.
That service’s main rival, Global Entry Spotter, aims to do even better, charging $25 for SMS alerts, also for three locations that you choose. Alex Tilford, one of the people behind Global Entry Spotter, tells Frommer’s that his service doesn’t expire after a month. “There are some enrollment center locations where you may not get many alerts within 30 days,” Tilford says.
Most Global Entry Spotter customers tend to stop their memberships within 60 days, Tilford says. That indicates how long it takes travelers to find interview success using the service.
Relying on real-time data, Global Entry Spotter maintains a free map of the country’s worst problem spots for scheduling backups. The redder the dot on the map, the longer the wait. (What’s going on over there, Milwaukee?)
Appointment Scanner’s version of the same wait-time map can be found here—its predictions are much the same.
Tilford tells Frommer’s that “by the end of February” 2025, Global Entry Spotter will also add the ability to find back-to-back appointment slots so families and small groups who are applying at the same time have a better shot at finding interview slots together.
Another service, the Global Interview app, lists newly available appointment slots and alerts users via push notifications. The app, a pet project of its developer, only costs $5, but most reviews are a couple of years old.