The Airlines Role in Pre
 

My wife is Diamond Elite, Global Entry, and Nexus. Today for the seventh time in a row she did not get Pre. She has gotten it numerous times int he past. The TSA person told her that while the TSA initially approves an applicant, Delta makes the trip-by-trip call as to whether she is selected. I was wondering what people thought about that assertion.

I'm going to call that Bull- um - pucky.

TSA makes the call. TSA designed the program with a degree of randomness so that a hypothetical bad guy couldn't invest 10 or 20K gain entry to Precheck and be assured that on 'the day' s/he could skate through.

The Airlines's interest is exactly opposite, to make the process as smooth as possible for their premium flyers.

http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/howitworks.shtm

My internal geigercounter is going off as well based on the same basic reasoning.

I'm guessing there is a problem with a mismatch between her name in the Secure Flight data on each ticket and what is printed on her Nexus card. Could it be that her middle name is on one but not the other? There was a recent memo about this from the TSA to the airlines.. a lot of people with Known Traveler ID's have been rejected for PreCheck for this reason (apparently)... myself included.

It doesn't necessarily matter that the boarding pass itself to have an exact match of the name..just be sure the Secure Flight info for each of her itineraries has the name matching exactly with what's on her Nexus card and be sure the Known Traveler/PASSID is on there as well.

As I understand things from talking with a TSA suit who was asking people what they thought of PRE while they were collecting their things.

The airlines role beyond creating the barcode with the encoded yes/no is to simply select pax who the airline believes would benefit from the program.

From there if the pax agrees for the extra DATA to be shared with TSA, TSA determines if the pax is eligible for PRE.

I asked why the PRE line had like 5 people while the Elite Line had tons or people in it, he indicated to me that at first TSA had a quota per shift/day (he was not specific) at each airport of PRE eligable people and if things progress without major issues with the program those quotas will be raised over time.

Dan

This... I recently had the same issue and am working to get it resolved by making sure information on Secure Flight, Nexus, AND corporate travel (where tickets are booked/billed) all match exactly. If you have tickets booked through a seperate travel service make sure they're putting the right name on.

I fly on AA, and know I'm in the pre-check system (since I am EXP and in the GE program and my profile on AA.com shows this). I have 8 future itns, and when I look separately at my profiles for each, all but one shows pre-check--the one exception (was booked through a TA, who placed my first name + middle initial all in the first name field) does not show pre-check, hence I assume that I will not be selected when I go through TSA in LGA next week. Can AA at the airport, fix this error--AA.com CS and exp agents couldn't.