US: Is the TSA’s $85 PreCheck program too pricey?

The “divesting” of shoes, laptops, and toothpaste tubes, to use the US TSA’s term, has been one factor in the airport security lines entangling US travellers this spring. The agency’s PreCheck program is designed to fix that problem and move the lines—but only 2.77m people have enrolled to date, far below projections. The TSA wants to have 25m people signed up by 2019 for federal “trusted traveler” programs such as PreCheck, for domestic travel, and Global Entry, the program for international travelers run by the US Customs and Border Protection. Efforts to push TSA PreCheck were galvanized this spring by weeks of frustratingly long security lines which quickly spiked enrollments. Daily applications jumped to 16,000 in May, double the rate of the prior month. “I won’t say we were caught off guard with this, but I will tell you the surge happened much more rapidly than anyone could anticipate,” said Charlie Carroll, a senior VP at MorphoTrust USA, which runs the program. But according to the US, Travel Association, a lower fee and simpler application process would spur 7m more people to enroll in the PreCheck program. In a statement Thursday, the group based its claim on a survey of 1,000 domestic travellers conducted March 7-10. Of the 1,000 people, 20.5% said they would likely enroll in PreCheck. Among the rest, half cited the $85 fee as the reason they would probably not enroll. <br/>