International transit area at IAH?
 

Does anyone know if there is such a thing as an international sterile transit area at IAH? I have a 90 min connection arriving from AMS on KLM and departing to BOG on CO. Just curious what my best options are!

After you clear through customs, head straight towards the terminal area instead of veering left towards the big doors for pax that are exiting into Houston.

As american airports are not build in the way airports in europe are, there is no such thing as "free transit area" or area that do not require going through passport control. If you are traveling without a visa to the US and need to connect through you will still go through passport control with a special form and then be escorted to your next flight. If you have a visa or do not need one, just clear customs and go back into the main terminal gates area again.

Thanks very much for the responses. No visa issues at all - just a tight connection. Forgot that even the int'l concourses at most US airports are not no man's land like at most other airports in the world.

FYI-I just made a 50 minute connection from an international flight yesterday with PLENTY of time to spare. I whisked through passport control and customs within 10 minutes.

ONE NOTE--HOWEVER! Make sure that you get the KLM agent in AMS gives you a BP for the CO flight. Since they are partners and hopefully you are travelling on a code share flight, they should not have a problem doing this. IF THEY DO NOT, your connection will be tight because you cannot go down the connections hall outside of customs without a boarding pass for a same-day flight out of IAH. The line at the CO desk to get boarding passes outside of customs was VERY VERY LONG and didn't seem to be going very quick.

There IS a small transit lounge right outside the arrival gates at terminal D (before going down the ramp that leads you to immigration). I used it once going MEX-IAH-LGW, with the LGW flight departing from terminal D and my bags checked all the way to LGW with some kind of special "International Baggage" tag (which basically meant that I would not need to pick up my bags in IAH and then redeposit them at the connection desk). I have seen airport agents receiveing the flights from MEX that connect directly to LGW, CDG or NRT looking for people connecting to one of those places and then taking them to that lounge. The time that I was there we only had to wait for about 15 minutes at the lounge and then were taking directly to our flight. I would assume that is the place where they keep people traveling without visas between two international flights.

Maybe you should ask at check-in in BOG if that kind of connection is possible on your flight (beats having to rush through immigration and customs to end up a copule of gates away from where your flight arrived).