At Dulles, if you are connecting on United to United, you don’t need to use the people mover shuttle buses. They have a separate immigration and customs area under the gate area just for people making connections.
The flights from Europe to Boston mostly arrive within a 2 or 3 hour window in the early evening, too. Lines tend to get backed up then. It’s a miserable place to change airlines to a domestic flight, too.
Customs is almost always going to be a hassle. But entering via a different airport just because they have a slightly better process means an unnecessary layover, and you’ll have to recheck your bags for the connecting flight. I’d much rather just get to my destination.
Exactly. That’s fundamentally my answer to the question. The best place to enter the USA is the airport that doesn’t require a further connection.
However, you might not have a direct connection, and still have choices. For example, for me flying from Sydney (SYD), my nearest international airport, I have a choice of Los Angeles (LAX) or San Francisco (SFO) for direct flights. If I’m not just going to California, either is about equally convenient. Having gone through both many times, I think they are about equally bad as far as immigration and customs go, but I prefer SFO as being more attractive, easier to get around, and having a better range of shps and restaurants.
With the original question, if you are travelling with a child who might get impatient standing in a queue for hours, I just think you need to prepare for the ordeal – first, by warning the child about what might happen, and second, by bringing books or toys that might keep the child amused.
I live in DC, so Dulles is my my final destination and I have to take the people mover prop from the 1970s Logan’s Run TV show every time. I have Global Entry and only use carry on though, so I can be in a cab on 66 before most people have cleared customs.
For me flying from Melbourne (MEL) to LAX or SFA, MEL makes both of those look good.
Not because it takes a long time – unless you’re unlucky, 45 minutes inbound and 15 minutes outbound is plenty – but because they are so publicly incompetent and self-serving.
If you are stuck in a queue for two hours because there is only one guy, it’s not his fault. If it’s because half (50%) of the staff is “supervising” instead of working, and they are “supervising” (ie talking to their friends) in plain view, right behind the closed stations, that’s irritating. When they are “supervising” (ie talking to their friends, in plain view, reight behind the closed stations) and you have been put into a closed quueue and abandoned there when the station officer moved to a different station, and the “supervisors” are too busy not-working to even do any “supervising”, and you’re just stuck there, with your wife and 5-yo kid, — you’re at Melbourne Airport.
Miami is by far the worst for Customs that I have ever seen. Avoid it at all costs. Seattle is not bad. Boston doesn’t suck.
I think our advice might depend on their destination. East Coast versus West Coast might result in different answers. Let us know when they’re traveling next, and we’ll sing out.
A late answer: Charlotte, NC. It was practically a joy to enter the country. The immigration concourse wasn’t far from the jetway, the agents were friendly, and it wasn’t far to get to the rest of the airport. I hope the recent merger hasn’t removed international flights from CLT.
I’ll take Minneapolis-St Paul over Chicago anyday. MUCH nicer customs people.
That’s the issue at a lot of airports I’ve been through; the Customs and immigration areas are huge, and they have a lot of people working, but due to the way that the international flights work, they tend to get big rushes of several wide-body planes all at once, and then everyone ends up standing around for hours waiting on the staff to chug through everyone.
Fun story: my (US citizen) wife and I (permanent US resident, UK citizen) were flying into Miami from Grand Cayman and catching a connecting flight to Orlando. We had to pass through customs and immigration in Miami, since it was our point of reentry. We’d worked a four hour “layover” into our itinerary before the Orlando flight since we knew Miami was usually busy.
When we arrived in the immigration hall, there was a ridiculous queue for noncitizens - four or five switchbacks, each one at least 50 yards from end to end. There was a fairly short queue for US citizens. We hadn’t travelled internationally since our wedding and asked the USCIS staffer at the entrance to the hall whether we needed to stay together. He - in broken English - told us we’d have to go separately since only one of us was a US citizen. So we did; she went off to the US line and I stayed in the foreign nationals line.
Of course, you’ve anticipated the punchline. Three and a half hours later we were reunited on the other side. It had taken her 15 minutes. Then we went through customs together, and were dressed down by the customs agent for having two separate entry cards. He was apologetic when we explained that the other USCIS guy had made us do it that way and said in the future I could go through the US nationals line when traveling with her. Did I mention that cellphones were banned in the immigration hall, so she (a nervous flyer at the best of times) had no way to find out where I was or when I’d be out?
Fortunately, our connecting flight still showed as “boarding.” So we ran to the American Airlines (I think) check-in area and were told that “we had missed the flight.” When we pointed out that it was still boarding they basically told us to fuck off and gave us (from what was clearly a well-used cubby) a card to take to the main check-in desk for an alternate flight.
Which turned out to be the next day. And no, sir, we can’t provide you with a rental car (since I was perfectly happy to drive four hours to Orlando rather than stay five more minutes in Miami). Or a hotel. You should have anticipated this delay when you booked, sir.
So I killed the guy at the check-in counter and we took his car home. I have a picture I took of the huge mass of people waiting in the foreign immigration queue somewhere and I’ll post a link to it later.
Anyway, the point is that you should never fly via Miami. On the other hand, Orlando (despite handling large volumes of international flights) is clean, surprisingly quiet, and efficient. It’s one thing about this town that I am weirdly proud of.
I had a very similar experience at Phoenix, AZ. It was a breeze and everybody was friendly.
Ah, here it is. I was about two thirds of the way through when this was taken, and probably two thirds of the way to the end horizontally. So this is probably about a quarter of the entire queue.
Interesting point.
I’ve never flown outside the US, but we have hosted Canadian students (Québec) several years in a row and they’ve always flown into Baltimore, doing the preclearance thing on the Canadian side. The ones that have flown from Québec City and changed in Toronto did have to retrieve their luggage, but there wasn’t the Canadian customs thing of course. They never had any special issues but I could see if there were weather problems causing delays it might have caused some hearburn.
The one who flew from Montréal had a direct flight, so he didn’t even have that problem.
I’d definitely vote for going through preclearance if it’s an option, though it affects the route on the other side of course. Wikipedia’s article suggests that it might not be that great a timesaver though.
Another sitesuggests that they’re considering adding Heathrow and Manchester to the list.
Ah, Miami. I once landed there about 5 minutes after a flight from Bogota, Colombia. They checked those passengers every which way from Friday before they finally got to us. Then they checked US in every way possible. Four bleeping hours worth of checking.
Saving the day from my niece’s meltdown would make it worth it.
As a US permanent resident, you should go in the US-citizen queue. That’s what I did for the nine years that I was a green-card holder.
My wife isn’t a permanent resident or green-card holder, just a normal Thai national. But flying into JFK, I asked the official directing citizens and noncitizens into the different queues if she could go with me in the citizen’s queue, and he said sure. JFK was pretty painless and quick despite the long line.
It’s not really that great an airport for all that many other things - but I’ve had good experiences coming back internationally into Philadelphia (PHL). It’s a big enough airport (American hub) with lots of immigration lines - but not a huge number of passengers, so they’ve always moved quickly for me.
I haven’t done a lot of international flying, so I can’t swear its better than most of the other suggestions, but I found it not bad.