Hints for Avoiding Family Passport Headaches

This June, Carla Caccavale Reynolds took her five-week-old daughter on a business trip with her to Aruba. But unexpected delays at the US passport office almost derailed her trip.

The New York mom figured on stalls with her infant daughter's passport, so she paid an extra fee to receive it within days—$60 on top of the regular $82 fee, and another $14 to have the passport overnighted once it was processed. What she didn't plan on were the headaches over changing her name on her own passport, something she hadn't bothered doing since she got married.

After waiting 14 weeks for her own passport (submitted a week before her daughter's), Reynolds started to get worried. "I called the National Passport Agency over 400 times and was only able to get through about four times," she explains. "After three days of trying and trying—I would wake up at 5:55AM to be ready to dial when they opened at 6:00—I finally got through."

Her passport arrived two days before her trip.