Denrael

I am a member of Clear which is a registered traveler program. There are both pluses and minuses to this. On the plus side, for any Clear airport, they provide a seperate queue which generally gets me thru TSA in under 5 minutes. They also provide concierge to carrry all my stuff after disrobing and dropping the modern day equivilent of the utility belt. On the minus side, other than the queue times there are no other real savings. I go through an extra bio-security check to make sure I’m me, then do the normal TSA shoe shuffle, etc. The other minus is that they are in very few airports. All in all though, given how much time I spend in airports, it’s a win-win for me.

There are competing programs to Clear, but they do have reciprocity meaning that I can use my Clear card at any Registered Traveler airport. I was in Jacksonville International (JAX) the other day. It turns out that they are served by a competing program, offered by Vigilant Solutions. From what I could see, they also offer a VIP lounge to their members…a nice touch. The downside is that compared to the Clear airports, there is almost no marking indicating that they support registered traveler programs. Indeed, I didn’t discover it myself until I was thru the normal TSA security. Only then did I see the ad indicating that they supported a registered traveler program.

Jacksonville needs to improve their marketing of their program, so travelers who do not base out of JAX are aware of it. Also, more airports need to consider supporting the Registered Traveler program.

I inquired at MSP about the program recently, and was told that they were “actively watching” the early results, but that thus far they had not seen any improvements. They cited that fact that the actual security process has even more steps in it (the bio-check) as a reason for holding back. While I fully agree that I’m not seeing a lot of improvement for having to submit to a complete background check, the faster line and concierge service more than make up for having to submit to the same TSA on-site scrutiny. This leave me in a bit of a quandry; unless things change, the queue will be faster only if few people join. If only a few people join, they will never improve the process or expand to new airports.