New passport requirements for travelers to countries in the Americas and the Caribbean may soon have some area residents scrambling.
Federal laws set to take effect Jan. 8 require U.S. citizens to have a passport when traveling by air to Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean and Bermuda. Visitors traveling by land or sea will be required to have a passport by Jan. 8, 2008.
Only about 27 percent of U.S. citizens have a passport, and millions of Americans travel to those destinations without one each year.
For example, about 15 million Americans traveled to Canada in 2004, according to figures from the Canadian Tourism Commission, many without a passport.
While the new requirements are still three months away, AAA Mid-Atlantic is advising area residents to apply for a passport now. It typically takes about six weeks to obtain a new passport and the new requirements are expected to generate an additional 2 million applications, said John Townsend, a spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic.
With the popularity of holiday travel to destinations such as the Caribbean, many of those requests will be made in the coming months.
“Plenty of people have grown accustomed to traveling to the Caribbean, Bermuda and other parts [of the Americas without a passport],” Townsend said. “This will impact that.”
Leisure travelers in the region are more likely to be affected by the new rules than business travelers, said Bill Connors, executive director and COO of the Alexandria-based National Business Travel Association.
“Most business travelers have passports,” he said.
However, for travelers who live on states bordering Canada and Mexico, the impact is likely to be bigger, Connors said. The association lobbied hard to get the deadline for land and sea passport requirements pushed back to 2008 because many living in bordering states may not have passports.
“There?s an awful lot of commerce that happens by rail or by car,” he said. The 2007 deadline “would have created all sorts of havoc.”
