Thanks for the comment. The thing is my travel is not urgent. It's more of a wish-to travel to see my parents on a special religious occasion since I haven't seen them for 3+ years. From what I saw, Feb applicants experience delays. Those who applied in January got their passport in a calenderer month. I hope these cases are the exceptions and not the norm since those who report on these forums are few. I don't want to deal with them over the phone and wait for hours to speak with an agent, and transfer my file to a local office. They may not send my certificate with it, and then I would have to wait for my certificate ... etc. Someone else asked for urgent processing for the passport after in-mail application, and then waited 2 weeks or more to receive their certificate by mail. Bad experiences are all over the place.
I'm on the same boat as you. I also wish to travel in April or May to see my family. Nothing urgent, I just haven't seen them since 2019 because of the pandemic. Let's hope we get out passports soon.
Well, February applicants can't claim experiencing delays yet because it's been less than a month since they mailed in their applications. Based on what I've seen on this thread, it takes an average of 5 weeks or so to get your passport after submission.
Keep in mind that the passport office probably gets thousands of applications every month. You hear of a few bad experiences here and it makes you feel like it's chaos, but it's very likely a small percentage of the total of applications they process every month. You just don't hear from most of the successful cases.
After my citizenship ceremony I was worried about my certificate because I read here that some people face huge delays and the courier allegedly lost their documents, etc. But then I received my certificate barely a week after my ceremony.
My advice is to not worry or freak out until you absolutely have to. The process varies a lot from case to case. Let's be a bit more patient. we're at the very last step. we'll all have our passports soon!
