PalmTrees
Difficulty:  | Review Topic: Port of Entry Review
JFK was the worst airport I've ever travelled through, and as I've used about 12 in the US then that's saying something. I flew LHR-JFK-MIA leaving a 3 hour layover. My flight arrived late so by the time I reached the arrivals hall I had just 2 hours to get to a customs desk, have my paperwork turned in & visa stamped, collect my bags, re-check my bags, go through security and catch a bus to another terminal for my connecting flight!
Arriving in the customs area was hell on earth. An hour late already, there were hundreds of people there (this was at 2:30pm). Luckily staff were checking at various points in the queue if people had connecting flights. Once I flagged one staff member down and said how soon mine was I was whisked to the front of the queues.
I spoke to 4 members of staff before reaching the customs officer at the desk, and only 1 person knew what a K1 visa was and had seen the big brown envelope before. The customs officer was rude and also took a long time looking at the documents. He then (very slowly) escorted me over to a room full of new immigrants and put my envelope contents on a desk in a pile of other paperwork.
At this stage I had 90 mins to catch my flight. The officers were (slowly) checking paperwork from the desk and calling people up. There were around 30 people in the room, so I went up to the desk and asked one lady if it was possible to be seen any quicker as I had a flight to catch. I had also seen an officer put 2 more packages on the wrong end of the pile, meaning it was definitely not a first-come first-serve situation. The very nice lady said yes, confirmed I was getting married, said congratulations and gave me back my passport.
I ran to go get my bags. They had been unloaded from the conveyor belt by now, but staff directed me to the wrong set of bags from another flight. Argh! Finally found my bags and checked them back in, raced to security and found a queue of about 20 people with one security guard checking boarding cards and one guard scanning bags. Argh!
Made it through and caught the bus over to the farthest terminal from me. I made my flight but just in time.
To anyone considering using JFK as their POE - don't. Maybe I got unlucky and the airport was having an off day but it was horrendous. Staff were rude and unhelpful and there were hundreds of people not knowing what to do or where to go. I thought 3 hours would be a perfect amount of time to catch my next flight, but if you do need to use JFK then please schedule more than 3 hours layover just in case. The last thing you want as a new immigrant is to be stressed and dashing around with a luggage trolley.
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Port of Entry Member Review #15644
Entry Date: 2014-04-08