In late June, Luis Seija, 31, who lives in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse neighborhood, found out his best friend was making a change to his bachelor party destination. Instead of celebrating in Miami in August, the group would now be going to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

For Seija, there was only one problem: His passport expired last year.

He applied on June 28, paying $200 in all for an expedited renewal.

A year ago, Seija could have expected to receive a new passport within a month in time for the Aug. 10 departure. But now, he’s not feeling optimistic.

As an increasing number of people travel internationally post-pandemic, passport agencies across the country are seeing massive backlogs. Which means travelers are having to wait.

Since March, the U.S. State Department has increased the estimated passport processing times from six to eight weeks to 10 to 13 weeks. If you pay $60 for the expedited service, expect to wait seven to nine weeks, a significant increase from two to three weeks previously. These estimates don’t include mailing time, either.

U.S. officials say the delays are due to a surge in demand for passports — about 500,000 applications a week — as well as continued pandemic-related staffing shortages and a halt in online processing.

To keep up, the State Department told the Washington Post it has hired more staff and allowed existing staff to work overtime. The agency said 97% of passport applications are being processed within the extended time frames, and it hopes to get back to pre-pandemic wait times by the end of the year.

Seija hopes his can get processed faster than its ETA.

“Being there is extremely important,” he said. “How many people do I have to contact? How many appointments do I have to do?”

Seija hopes his can get processed faster than its ETA.

“Being there is extremely important,” he said. “How many people do I have to contact? How many appointments do I have to do?”

With the extended expedited deadline of seven to nine weeks, Seija likely won’t make his trip. At least not without help.

So earlier this month, he contacted U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans, whose office said it has seen “a significant increase in passport assistance requests in recent months.” Staffers from Evans’ office forwarded Seija’s email to the National Passport Information Center, which wrote that Seija’s application was “in process.”

Every day, emails and phone calls are flooding in to congressional offices. Anxious Philadelphia-area residents are pleading with their representatives and senators in Congress, asking for help expediting their passports.

Already this year, Sen. Bob Casey’s office has assisted with 1,400 passport cases, more than four times as many as this time last year, while Sen. John Fetterman has handled 550 since taking office in January. In New Jersey, Sen. Robert Menendez’s office is getting an average of 12 constituent calls a day about passports. In January, staffers were receiving about 12 a month.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon’s office has heard from nearly 600 of her constituents in Delaware County and parts of South Philadelphia.

The volume of people asking for help getting their travel documents “has increased significantly recently where it has become our top 5 and now our No. 1″ constituent concern, said Rep. Chrissy Houlahan who’s handled 500 passport cases since January. “It’s surpassed things like the IRS or the VA or Social Security, so it’s a big deal.”

Given the significant delays, officials recommend applying for passports at least six months ahead of any planned travel.

That would also ease the burden on the offices of local members of Congress, whom constituents often call in a panic if it looks as if their passport won’t arrive on time.

It takes time and effort to address these inquiries, several congressional staffers said, but they try to help regardless of whether the passport is needed for a long-planned vacation or an urgent family emergency.

Houlahan put it bluntly: “We are overwhelmed.”

In Wynnefield, James Deng had heard the horror stories about passport wait times, the tales of people spending their last days before a trip full of anxiety over whether the crucial documents would arrive in time.

So in December, nearly a year before his family’s European vacation, Deng, 40, who works in accounting, applied for passports for himself and his 3-year-old son. He couldn’t get an appointment in Philadelphia, so he drove 45 minutes to Quakertown.

He was glad he started the process well in advance: It took three months for the passports to arrive.

“The only good thing about it was because we weren’t rushing for our travel,” Deng said.

In Fairmount, Bobby Hughes, 42, wasn’t thinking about passports last fall when he booked a Disney cruise for his wife and three children. After surprising them with the trip for Christmas, it dawned on Hughes: He and his children needed passports.

“But then the season happens, life happens,” Hughes, the men’s basketball coach at Rosemont College, said. “All of a sudden it was like, ‘Oh my, we haven’t done this yet.’ ”

It was late March, and he and his wife were reading stories on social media about long wait times. They started looking for appointments online. The soonest, most convenient one they could find was two weeks later, right around Easter, in Ocean City, N.J., Hughes said, where the family would be anyway to visit his parents and in-laws.

The process was surprisingly painless, he said, but “it was a lot of money” — about $600 in all for four expedited passports.

Less than two months later, though, they had their passports.

“It was a huge relief,” he said. “I could not imagine the people who are trying to do this last minute.”

This week, Seija also reached out to Sen. Fetterman. But he isn’t hopeful that his representatives will be able to help.

“They’re kind of just like us. They call. They send an email,” he said. “Their pull doesn’t seem as influential as I thought it’d be.”

(Staffers said they regularly communicate with federal agencies on behalf of constituents via departments specifically for congressional inquiries, which cannot be used by the general public.)

Seija, a doctor, said he understands why there are delays. Still, he wishes the process required a bit less work on the part of the applicant.

“We just went from three years of no travel to minimal travel to now everyone’s just amped up and living their best lives,” he said. But “you have work. You have other obligations, and the idea of setting aside a full day ... trying to get this done — sure, we’ll obviously try to make it happen. But it’s like, damn, why doesn’t the system work?”