Following is a travel reality:  Many countries will deny you entry for those who have fewer than three visa pages in your passport. A passport’s life is 10 decades but these pages fill if you travel frequently. Our  standard procedure when we get near to full is to add additional pages,  easily done via an online application at travel.state.gov. (We just did it last month, and it took two weeks from application to receipt of older, fatter passport.)

Do it if you are in the exact same boat and thinking about adding pages. The State Department just announced that as of December 31, 2015 that they will NOT be offering the service. Instead, applicants will be given the 52-page booklet from the counter. Run from pages and you’ll have to renew your passport entirely, which means losing all of those beautiful stamps.