WASHINGTON-
Planning a last-minute beach getaway in January or February?
If you were hoping to fly to the Caribbean or Mexico, you’d better have your passport.
New rules will require all air travelers to the U.S. to have a passport by Jan. 23, including U.S. residents and citizens returning home by air from Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.
It normally takes six to eight weeks to obtain a passport, or about two weeks if you’re willing to pay for expedited service.
But if you don’t have time for that or simply can’t be bothered, here are some alternatives.
You could take a cruise that visits Mexican or Caribbean ports, since land and sea travelers won’t need a passport for those destinations until 2008 at the earliest. You could stay within the 50 states, and pick a beach in Florida, like Bahia Honda State Park in the lower Florida Keys, or in Hawaii, like Kahala Beach in Oahu. You could head for Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands, which are both U.S. territories.
Or drive or take a bus tour across the border to Mexico. From San Diego, head for Tijuana or Rosarito in the Baja; from Tucson, Ariz., drive to Puerto Penasco, also known as Rocky Point; and just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, is an interesting shopping and cultural destination, Matamoros.
If you do want to obtain or renew a passport, you can get information online from the U.S. State Department at or from the Travel Industry Association’s .
To obtain a passport for the first time, you must go in person to one of 9,000 passport-acceptance facilities located around the country with two photographs of yourself, proof of U.S. citizenship and a photo identification, such as a driver’s license. The facilities include some post offices and other government agencies. To find a location near you, type in your zip code at .
Passport fees are $97 for adults, $82 for children under 16. Processing time varies but typically takes six to eight weeks. For an extra $60, plus overnight delivery fees, you can expedite the service and get the passport within two weeks.
Although only about 27 percent of Americans currently hold a passport, the number of passports issued has steadily risen over the past five years. In the 2002 fiscal year, only 7 million passports were issued; in the 2006 fiscal year, 12.1 million passports were issued, according to statistics on the U.S. State Department Web site. In 1996, only 5.5 million passports were issued.
The National Passport Information Center can be reached at 877-487-2778.
