pattyrung

Just so others don't go through the same experience as my husband and I did yesterday at JFK, let me give you an update on this situation. Because we both had conditional approvals, we had read that the JFK GE office was open 24/7 and that it was easy to do a walk-in. My husband had a 6:30 flight out of terminal 4, and we went in plenty of time with all documents. The earliest time I'd been able to schedule at the Customs House location in Manhattan was Oct 30. We have international travel Sept 29-Oct 16, and it made sense to get this taken care of. We signed in on the sheet, showing our arrival time...and no appt times (which we told the person), and we were directed to sit in the waiting room. We weren't surprised to see others taken ahead of us...but after 40 minutes, my husband checked the list and saw that our names were crossed off. We thought that might mean someone would call us soon? When we asked, after another 5 minutes, we were told they don't take walk-ins. I inquired why we weren't advised of this as soon as we got there, and we got the typical "not my problem" response. There was no supervisor available (of course not on a Sunday late afternoon). There were plenty of agents available; yet we were not seen. So I returned home on the Air Train...having wasted 4 hours on a beautiful afternoon. Perhaps other locations are more helpful and less bureaucratic...and maybe have more appointment times. We should have scheduled online--but thought to be courteous and not have to cancel last-minute since we weren't 100% sure we'd be able to make it to JFK in advance of my husband's flight to allow for the interviews. Now I'll be doing another Air Train r/t, WITH an appt. Sure hope the program itself is run in a more customer-friendly way.