If you have plans for international travel in the near future, you’re not alone. June figures released by the federal government provide some context on just how much busier this summer has been than the past two when it comes to international trips, and there’s every reason to believe June was just the beginning.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials screened more than 9.7 million passengers in June – a number that includes all U.S. citizens and non-citizens who went through passport control at airports while entering the U.S. or went through international preclearance. Put plainly, it’s an indicator of international air travel volume.
Those June numbers were up 1,701% compared to 2020 which, while staggering, isn’t a huge surprise considering the extent to which international travel shut down in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the June CBP numbers also were double those from a year ago, when agents cleared more than 4.8 million international passengers.
These figures are a sign of what TPG has been reporting for months leading into the summer: a travel season unlike any in recent years, including a huge spike in trips abroad.
by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
The surge in passengers arriving at U.S. customs facilities also comes just months after the country’s testing mandate for international passengers ended, affecting both American travelers considering the ease of a trip abroad (and back home) and international visitors considering trips to the U.S.
In announcing those June numbers, CBP officials touted the agency’s response to the surging volume, noting agents had processed travelers “without any significant delays.”
At the same time, agency data analyzed by TPG points to moderately longer average wait times for arriving travelers so far this summer compared to the same time period in 2019.
As you might expect, the busiest times at customs generally fall each day between mid-afternoon and evening, when many international flights arrive in the U.S. If you’re arriving from an international flight at a major U.S. airport during those hours, there’s a good chance you’ll see pretty big crowds, though that’s also when CBP tends to have the most booths open in order to handle the volume.
TPG analyzed data from May 27, the Friday leading into Memorial Day weekend, this year through July 21. We also compared 2022 data with the numbers from the Friday leading into Memorial Day 2019 through July 21, 2019.
Keep in mind, that these are across-the-board average numbers, so if you are a member of a CBP Trusted Traveler Program, most notably Global Entry, you’ll almost certainly fall at the far shorter end of the wait time range.