>>Do you know that if when you are pre approved for the interview and pick say SFO do you get other options like say downtown SF or is it strictly the airport?<<

It is at SFO and only SFO.

Yep - only at SFO. And appointments are booked out at least four months.

Wow.

Thank you.

You can now do the interview and biometrics at immigration when you return from an overseas trip. SFO is one of the participating airports. No appointment needed. It's called "enrollment on arrival": https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-t...llment-arrival

Just an FYI if anyone is still following this. In busy centers, you cannot walk in for a Global Entry interview without an appointment or they are, at best, highly restricted. That's true almost everywhere. It's quite different for Pre-Check, which you can almost always do without a wait and without an appointment. Check the Global Entry web site for SFO and see what they offer.

It's always the same here in NYC, though we can interview both downtown and at JFK. I applied for Global Entry on a Thursday, was approved on Saturday, couldn't get an appointment downtown for 5 months, and then found a cancellation for the same week on Tuesday.

By Thursday afternoon I had my Global Entry membership. The short answer is that you shouldn't ever assume the worst and should keep trying to find something; appointments always open up, but you have to be diligent about checking.

Otherwise, the on-arrival program sounds ideal. The downside of Global Entry on Arrival is that you won't have Pre-Check on your way out of the country, so you'll be missing some benefit.

<i>The downside of Global Entry on Arrival is that you won't have Pre-Check on your way out of the country, so you'll be missing some benefit.</i>

Remember that the airline on which you're flying must participate in the TSA Pre program in order to use it. Some non-US airlines now participate, but many do not...yet:

https://www.tsa.gov/precheck/participating-airlines

Update - we both did a "drop-in" appointment at Oakland Int'l Airport on our way home from Mexico earlier this month. We were going through immigration, and they said they would take us for interviews right then. All we needed were our passports - everything else was on the computers. Approved and received our cards about two weeks later. Guess SFO is no longer the only game in the Bay Area.

That’s good news. We have two locations in Aouthern Arizona so xouldn’t figutre out what was foong on Bay Area. We will need to tenew them next year and hope it’s easy to do.

Good for you! Glad it worked out so well.