A Couple of Simple Global Entry Questions
 

My Wife and I have decided to get Global Entry Cards. It's only a little more that the TSA thing and provides a second form of ID I can use if TSA totally loses its mind.

However I have a couple of questions.

First there is a difference in the way my wife's name is styled on her passport, on her Drivers license and in most Frequent Flyer Programs. Will this present any problems for her flying domestically? To date she's only used her drivers license and the Frequent Flyer Programs agree with it.

Second our passports expire next year and I know I'll need to renew them and get the Global Entry updated for foreign travel. However will the lack of either a renewed passport or an update in the Global Entry record have any effect on TSA and domestic travel?


Thanks a lot.

My take on your wife's name situation is that at least her passport and frequent flyer accounts have to line up exactly and that will match up with the name used in GE. My wife and I both work for the Federal government and a few years ago they got all buggy about our various IDs and actually "made" us line up our passports and the names we used in the Defense Travel System. That had a waterfall effect in that the airlines then wanted our profiles to use exactly the same name. I think Texas got into the act too and required or at least strongly suggested we use our full exact names on our driver's license. A bit of a hassle at first but now it's all done so every form of official ID we have and every airline profile uses exactly the same name. Is it absolutely necessary? Probably not but have to say once it was done we've had no problems with any travel from a ID issue. I can't answer the second question. Your KTN is issued in conjunction with the GE enrollment but I don't know how firm the link is or if an expired passport causes the GE program to suspend both GE and the associated KTN. Can't put my finger on a reference or post here one way or the other. Since our offices track our passports for official travel we don't have the luxury of letting them expire and usually start getting reminders to renew six months out. They get more frantic and insistent the closer we get to expiration so the easy solution is just to get it done and over with.

At least anecdotally, Pre-Check is being denied a great deal more often for people who do not have an exact match between KTN and ticketed name. For GE purposes, the means Passport = GE (KTN) = FF Profile = Ticket. As Randyk47 notes, many Federal agencies and large businesses have required that their regular travelers align all of these things anyway. It's good practice and you should too.

To that end, get your passports renewed now. In theory it's a "waste" of a year, but it's not really a big deal. Have the renewals in the exact names as on your DL or have the passports renewed as is and have your wife's DL changed to properly reflect the passport. Then do the name changes on all her FF profiles. Some of this takes paperwork and some of this, when it's minor, doesn't. It's a hassle, but it's a one-time thing. Just get it right, down to the punctuation and extra spaces.

I have no idea what happens to TSA Pre-Check if you have it through GE and your passport expires. They are separate programs, but I don't know how the KTN linkage works for that purpose. I would not rely on anything CBP or TSA say and even if what they say today is correct, who knows what the technology does in a year.

Just renew the passports, calendar the renewal into the future and life will be easier.

Might add that I read here somewhere that all KTNs, actually the PassID numbers, generated out of the GE program start with 98. As I said earlier I don't know if that speaks to a hard link so that a voided GE enrollment also voids the PassID and therefore voids PreCheck. It may be a "one and done" so once the KTN/PassID is passed to TSA PreCheck it just stays effective until the expiration date.

NOTE: Reading another thread here I see that there supposedly is a disconnect between Sentri and PreCheck right now and Sentri enrollees aren't getting PreCheck. That would imply that there is a live link between Trusted Traveller programs. May be unique to and only apply to Sentri but.........

Do I have to use my full name when buying tickets with GE / TSA Pre?
 

Hi,

I just had my GE interview and was accepted into the program. Woop! :D However, I have a question that I only remembered as I was driving back from the GE office that I thought that some people here might know the answer to.

I have several middle names, and on my passport, my first name and middle names are all lumped together as my 'given names'.

Given name: Jon Frederick Hamilton Steven
Last name: Smith

My CA driving license, I94 and visa are all the same.

When I have booked tickets in the past with domestic and international airlines, I have just provided my first and last names and there has never been an issue with any of the airlines or with CBP. However, in order to match up to my Known Traveller Number for Global Entry and TSA Pre, should I include my middle names in the middle name field or maybe put my full given name as the 'first name', or does it not matter as long as the Known Traveller Number is correct?

http://i.imgur.com/cgVpbLY.png


Thanks very much for your help,
Jon

This was posted by the then TSA Press Secretary a couple of years ago:

Thanks for the quote. If you were in my position, would you just put first name and all middle names under the 'first name' field?

I do not have a middle name, so I never had such worries.

If I were in your shoes, I'd try to make sure that the name in the PNR matches the one in my passport as close as possible. I would enter as many middle names as will fit in the middle name field, not first name field.

Cool, thanks.

I have 2 middle names, and how they're written vary by agency and document:
GE profile: first=A, middle=B C, last=D
Passport: first=A B C, last=D
(Passports don't seem to have middle name fields, hence the names are usually fed into the first name field).

Flying with United, I've supplied my data both as:
First=A, middle= [empty], last=D
First=A, middle=B C, last=D

I've gotten Pre with both variants (I haven't tried First=A B C, middle=[empty], Last=D yet). I've always travelled with my passport, and the clerks haven't cared about the BP name either way (the name on the BP usually gets smushed into D/MrABC with parts of C cut off since there's not enough space, or just D/MrA if I don't use the middle names).

"MR" added to end of my first name - so no TSA PreCheck?!!
 

I recently became a Nexus member (probably 2-3 months ago). I was flying from Chicago to Toronto, and while checking in at the airport, the boarding pass did not have any TSA PreCheck on it!

The United Airlines agents had no idea what to do. They said that my KTN (or the security number on the back of my Nexus card) was in the system, and all my information was correct...so they had no idea why my boarding pass printed without the TSA PreCheck symbol. I checked with three different agents, and nobody had a clue.

Finally one agent said that as there was a "MR" immediately after my first name (i.e. if your name is KEVIN, the boarding pass shows KEVINMR), this was probably the reason why the system did not print the symbol.

This is incredibly frustrating - after having gone through security screening for Nexus, and all that stuff...now I won't get a TSA PreCheck on my boarding pass because of "MR" being added to my name? Ridiculous.

Does anyone have any way to work around this? This is the first time I was flying with my Nexus from the US to Canada (and of all my luck, it had to be on United Airlines where the agents had no idea what to do). I had only used my Nexus on a domestic flight within Canada once before, and there was no issue then (as I just needed to show my Nexus card to use the Nexus lane).

If you have Twitter, contact @Ask TSA. In the past, they have worked directly to help pax get specific problems sorted out.

Is that my only recourse? Was wondering...has nobody else had this issue?

Sounds as though the issue was with the airline, not the TSA.

You really should try at least one more flight. There is _no_ guarantee of getting Pre, you can randomly not be given Pre. You can't claim or be certain that Pre isn't working based on one datapoint.

My BPs also show Mr after my name: my most recent one, a UA flight on an AC ticket, showed LAST/FIRSTMR (usually I get LAST/FIRSTMIDDLE1MIDDLE2-cut-off with UA bookings). This isn't an issue. In fact I've had no issues getting Pre regardless of whether I included my middle names with the booking, and regardless of Mr showing on my BP.

You would however want to double-check that DOB and KTN are correct (make sure your DOB matches in GOES too). Any of those being wrong can stop you from getting Pre.

If you've checked the above and still don't get Pre, then you want to get in touch with the TSA.