Nobody’s ever been excited about the passport photo. You stand against the pharmacy wall under mug-shot lighting and pay for the privilege. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called those “hostage” photos last week, and he’s getting rid of them: beginning next year, Americans will be able to apply for a passport entirely online, upload a selfie from the couch, and watch the application’s status in real time instead of staring at the mailbox. Dawn Gilbertson, who writes the Journal’s Travel newsletter, carried the news in Monday’s Personal Journal — alongside a reader mailbag of travel hacks.
The date is the missing piece. Next year, the State Department says, and nobody will say which part of it. Renewals are already online in many cases; it’s the brand-new applications — the ones that still require an in-person appointment — that are moving. Rubio’s reason for the overhaul is the interesting part. Beyond the obvious — it’s 2026, as Gilbertson puts it, and nearly everything else happens online — he singled out the paid passport-help outfits, a cottage industry he described as “cashing in on every stage of the passport process.” Those are the companies behind the sponsored ads, and odds are someone in your family has paid one a hefty fee to fill out a form the government gives away.
The mailbag
The hacks are the fun half. Patrick Nowicki, writing from Denmark, drinks a cold can of beer just before security — it costs 10% of an airport beer and, he says, takes most of the stress out of the checkpoint. Ethan Bays of Oregon took three kids (8, 7 and 1) from Seattle to London on a red-eye and found that putting his wife in business class cost roughly the same as buying the 1-year-old his own economy seat. Dad and baby wore each other out in coach; once the baby fell asleep he carried him up front, and both slept until landing. “Wife happy, baby happy, boom!” Lance Fujisaki of Hawaii swears by an inflatable seat cushion for 16+-hour Europe runs. A Texan packs an international plug adapter even on domestic flights, because the international port in the seat is the one nobody’s worn out. And Nicholas Conant, a former pilot in Illinois, points out the hidden button at the base of the aisle armrest that lets it lift — handy when you’re hauling a toddler past it.
Our read
This is a Cash Flow (M5) story dressed up as travel news, and the money point is the one Rubio made: you don’t need to pay a middleman for a form the government gives away. The passport-expediter sites and the official-looking renewal services live on urgency and on a search engine that puts the ad above the answer. The same genre lives next door to retirement: paid Medicare helpers who happen to sell a plan, fee-for-service sites that file your Social Security claim, outfits that register your LLC for many times the state fee. The rule’s the same each time: find the .gov address first, then decide whether anyone else deserves a fee.
The Bays family’s trick is the better lesson, though — it’s a budget reframed. Rather than ask whether business class was affordable, he asked what the same dollars bought in sleep, split the family across two cabins, and got the outcome for the price of a seat he was going to buy anyway. That’s how we’d like you to look at every line of a trip budget: not cheaper, but better-spent. And if your passport’s within a year of expiring — many countries want months of validity left on arrival — check the date now, while the application is boring. You don’t wait for the first drop to find the umbrella, and you don’t wait for the departure gate to find out the passport’s expired.