CLEAR Picking Up A Bit Of Steam? Adds San Jose, Second New Airport In Roughly 30 Days

I don’t imagine there are a ton of fans of CLEAR right now.  When they folded a few years ago they lost all mindshare.  They were resurrected from the dead but didn’t have much relevancy because not too many airports signed on.

Add to that the ability to apply for Global Entry to access TSA PreCheck and the proliferation of PreCheck, and CLEAR became pretty much obsolete.

Lately, they landed a few jabs in the fight back to relevance.  The CLEAR lines were reorganized to flow directly into the PreCheck lanes at Denver airport.  And, they added a few airports, including San Antonio just a couple months ago.

On Tuesday, they announced San Jose was signing on.

Nine airports is certainly not ubiquity.  Nor is the list of 9 airports all heavy hitters for business/frequent travelers:

Orlando (not a popular departure city for lots of business travelers)

Denver, SFO, Dallas (all major airports up and running, certainly makes them look credible)

Westchester, NY (small airport but affluent community that would likely pay to expedite security)

Coming soon:  San Antonio, San Jose and Houston (San Jose and Houston are bona fide major airports and add to credibility)

Just my two cents, but I’d say CLEAR needs two things to be relevant:

1.  Double the number of airports (and all 9 new ones need to be bigger than San Antonio.  Think ATL, LAX, IAD)

2.  They need PreCheck sign-ups to go up and the lines to get longer.  Then, their integrated service in a place like Denver offers meaningful value for frequent travelers.

Right now, I just don’t see it.  I like the service a lot, just not sure there’s a compelling value prop.