Two graduates of Covington Catholic High School have launched a new app aimed at helping international travelers avoid a monthslong wait to get Global Entry status.
Global Entry is a federal program that allows low-risk travelers coming from foreign countries to get through customs quickly. It involves a written application, background check and in-person interview and costs $100.
The wait times to get an appointment so that you can be interviewed by officials in order to get the status can be notoriously long, between three and eight months, depending on which city you live in. Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport has one of the centers.
Alex Tilford and Dylan Neff co-founded Global Entry Spotter, which seeks to expedite the process, reducing the wait to as little as a month. Both attended Covington Catholic High School, with Tilford graduating from Xavier University and Neff going to Purdue University and the University of California at Los Angeles, where he earned a Ph.D.
In 2023, Neff planned to move to Paris for a job and signed up for Global Entry but was going to be forced to wait six months for an appointment when he was leaving in 60 days.
“He would automate processes with code,” Tilford said of Neff, who taught himself to code. “He said, ‘I’ll build a little web scraper to check appointments for me.’”
Global Entry Spotter works by scraping the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website to find open appointments that people have canceled. It then sends a text message showing the number of open appointments on the first date of availability. For example, at CVG, Tuesday tends to be the most popular day to release new appointments.
The duo figured that others would be interested in doing the same thing and created an app that charges a one-time fee of $25 to find open appointments.
“We got the site up and running in about 30 days,” Tilford said. “We’re as shocked as anybody that this thing has worked. It’s been a fun project.”
About 80% of users get an alert within 24 hours, with 96% getting one within 48 hours.
“It’s rare anybody needs the product more than 30 days,” Tilford said.
So far, the service has helped about 1,700 people.
For now, the project is a side hustle, but there may be opportunities to build other apps and websites for services where there is a cumbersome waiting period, Tilford said.
“The longer we do it, the more opportunity we realize is here,” Tilford said.
