Northern Kentucky natives Alex Tilford and Dylan Neff co-founded a company to help anxious international travelers find more convenient interview timeslots for the increasingly popular Global Entry program.
So, what is Global Entry? It’s a U.S. Customs and Border Protection program that allows pre-approved, low-risk travelers to expedite their clearance into the United States.
Before enrollment, potential travelers must complete an extensive application and undergo a background check through the Trusted Traveler Program. This part of the process costs $100. Once approved, the traveler is eligible to schedule a required in-person interview that must be scheduled at a Global Entry Enrollment Center – available at 75 airports worldwide.
The problem? Interviews for Global Entry are highly coveted, and you can’t schedule them in advance. The competition for interview slots can result in exorbitant wait times for interested travelers.
Wait times for Global Entry interviews typically average between four and six months, according to the U.S. Customs & Border Patrol website. The pandemic exacerbated this problem, with many Global Entry enrollment centers experiencing severe backlogs.
Tilford and Neff’s website, Global Entry Spotter, helps people find the nearest and soonest available interview times, potentially expediting the grueling search process. The Global Entry Spotter computer program can scan over 100 Global Entry enrollment centers internationally for available interview times.
“People who are waiting six to eight months for this interview – what we do is scrape the website every few minutes, and then we send out a text message if there’s a new appointment available to people looking to get an appointment,” Tilford explained.
For a $25 subscription fee, customers will receive SMS messages straight to their phone notifying them of upcoming Global Entry interview times at airports across the country. To sign up for Global Entry Spotter, customers must submit their name, email address, and top three preferred interview locations in addition to paying the signup fee.
“We do this directly by checking the website and sending alerts to customers immediately when we find an appointment that meets their criteria,” Neff told LINK nky.
According to Tilford, Neff first stumbled upon the idea of Global Entry Spotter before moving abroad to Paris for a postdoctoral fellowship in physics. He attempted to schedule an interview but was quickly slapped with a six-month wait time.
Undeterred, he coded a computer program that scraped the Global Entry signup website in hopes of finding a more convenient interview time. The program would send an SMS directly to Neff when an interview slot opened up. Luckily for Neff, it worked, and he secured a better interview time to get into the Global Entry program.
Curious to see if the program would be useful to others, Neff contacted Tilford, who started scouring the internet to see if other people had run into a similar problem.
Through the research process, Tilford discovered that long wait times for Global Entry interviews were pervasive across the U.S. However, a small number of websites already offer a similar service. Committed to the idea, Tilford told LINK nky that he and Neff needed to market their company to stand out.
“There were people already doing it, but in my mind, the websites didn’t look great — it wasn’t marketed correctly,” he said.
The company went live in October 2023 and has attracted approximately 1,000 users thus far, Tilford said. The price has remained at $25 since inception.
“If you land on the site, it’s $25 – you can pay it and save six months on your wait time — bottom line,” he said.
One primary area in which Tilford and Neff thought Global Entry Spotter could stand out was giving subscribers access to data. The Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport has its own data page through the service, where customers can see charts and graphs showing the most popular meeting times and the probability of finding an appointment by an interview date, among other things.
“Someone searching for an appointment can use this data to determine their probability of finding an appointment by randomly checking, and even what times/days of the week are the best to check for new appointments,” Neff said.
So far, the reviews have been positive, with people from across the country providing testimonials of their experiences.
“What this is, for me and Dylan personally, is a proof of concept that we are able to create a meaningful solution,” Tilford said.
