By Catharine Hamm / Los Angeles Times
I’m not sure which is worse: knowing that you’ve lost your passport or knowing that someone else lost it for you.
I’m voting for the second. In the first case, you know whom to blame, you know most of the story (“I remember I had it out of my wallet when I checked into the hotel …”) and you have some hope of finding it by retracing your steps.
But finding a passport that is lost between its origination and your mailbox at your home is its own special kind of hell.
Here’s your anti-Hades guide to resolving a lost-in-transit passport.
The U.S. Department of State website, travel.state.gov, gives you the information you need to replace your passport if you can’t find it. (Did you look in the pocket of your carry-on? In your sock drawer?)
But what if it never arrived? This recently happened to a colleague. She and her family, including her school-age daughter, were planning to leave for Europe in six weeks.
Processing times to receive a passport are four to six weeks, according to State’s website. To be sure her daughter’s passport arrived in time, she asked (and paid) for expedited service. Expedited service takes two to three weeks, the website said.
Her daughter’s expired passport and birth certificate, submitted as part of the application process, were returned in the second week. (The new passport doesn’t arrive in the same envelope.)
When she hadn’t received the passport by Day 2 of Week 4, she called the National Passport Information Center, 877-487-2778, and was given a tracking number.
The passport had been delivered about three weeks ago, according to the tracking number.
“That’s when I panicked,” she said. She was told to send an urgent reissue request, and she did.
On a hunch, she decided to check with a neighbor, whose address is one digit different from her own. The neighbor thumbed through her mail and voila! There was the priority mail envelope with the document. Breathing again, she was able to cancel the urgent request.
I knew her trip had a happy ending, but my palms get sweaty over stuff like this so I asked the State Department what to do if the passport is lost in space. Here’s what I was told:
Step 1: Call the National Passport Information Center: 877-487-2778 or 888-874-7793 (TTY). The hours are 4 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays-Fridays and 7 a.m.-noon Saturdays; closed Sundays and holidays.
Step 2: Get the tracking number from the information center and ask for instructions on what to do in case of nonreceipt, not loss. Ask for the address of where you sent your original request. Ask for the date the document was issued. The reasons for this will become apparent.
Step 3: You’ll probably be told to complete form DS-86 (which you will find here: lat.ms/ds86). It must be sent to the same place you sent your original application.
Step 4: Go to the post office and get that form in the mail as quickly as possible.
The good news is that you don’t need proof that you didn’t receive your passport (because how do you prove a negative?) You do need to submit this form within 90 days of the issuance of the original document.
The other bit of good news is that if the documentation you used also wasn’t returned (again, the 90-day rule applies), you will be reimbursed for the cost of replacing those documents (save your receipts); credit monitoring also will be included.
You will not be reimbursed for the wear and tear on your psyche.
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