Knowing the wait at a border crossing only helps if you happen to look. And nobody wants to sit in a car park refreshing a page every ten minutes to find out whether the queue at Nădlac II has finally started moving.
So from today, CustomsWait can tell you. Turn on notifications and your phone lights up the moment something you care about changes — no page open, no app running, nothing to remember.
Four things we can tell you about
They're four separate tick boxes. Take all of them, take one, change your mind next week — it's your phone.
- Wait-time alerts for your crossings. The one most people come for. Pick a crossing and a direction, tell us your limit — let me know when the wait drops below 30 minutes — and we send a notification the moment travellers report it happening.
- New articles. A short ping when we publish something on the blog, in your language.
- Weekly wait-time roundup. The same Sunday summary the newsletter sends, as a notification instead: which crossings were busiest, and when.
- Announcements. Rare, and only when it genuinely matters — a new feature, or something changing at the border that affects everyone.
Switching them on takes about twenty seconds
- Sign in. You'll need a free account — but there's no password to invent or forget. Type your email, we send you a link and a short code, and you're in.
- Open your account page and find Push notifications. Tick Enable notifications on this device.
- Your browser asks once. Tap Allow. That's it — you're set up.
A couple of practical notes. Notifications are per device, so if you want them on your phone and your laptop, switch them on in both — your account page lists every device that's currently receiving, so you can always see what's on. And we will only ever ask for permission when you tap something of ours. If you say Not now, that's the end of it; we don't nag.
On iPhone and iPad, add us to your Home Screen first
This one is Apple's rule, not ours: on iOS, a website can only send notifications once it has been added to the Home Screen. It takes half a minute:
- Open CustomsWait in Safari (it has to be Safari for this step).
- Tap the Share button — the square with the arrow coming out of it.
- Choose Add to Home Screen, then Add.
- Open CustomsWait from the new icon on your Home Screen, not from Safari.
- Sign in there — the Home Screen app is treated as a separate app by iOS, so it won't already know you. Ask for a sign-in code and type it in; it's the quickest way. Then tick Enable notifications on this device and tap Allow.
If you tapped Enable in Safari before installing, don't worry — we remembered that you asked. Open the app from the Home Screen icon and it will pick up exactly where you left off.
On Android, Windows, Mac and Linux none of this is needed: notifications work straight from the browser tab.
Switching them off is even quicker
Everything is on the same account page, and nothing here is a trap:
- Too many of one kind? Untick that category. The others carry on.
- Done with this device? Untick Enable notifications on this device. That phone or computer stops immediately; your other devices are untouched.
- Want silence right now? Your phone's own notification settings work too, as they do for any app.
- One thing worth knowing: if you block notifications in your browser's settings, the browser will never ask again — that's a rule of the web, not a choice of ours. You'd have to allow them again in your browser settings before the switch on our page can do anything.
And notifications and email are completely separate. Turning off the pushed weekly roundup doesn't unsubscribe you from the emailed one, and unsubscribing from the newsletter doesn't silence your wait-time alerts. Two settings, two decisions, neither one quietly changing the other.
We'd rather send you too few than too many
A notification you didn't want is worse than no notification at all, so the alerts are deliberately cautious:
- Only real traveller reports set them off. A machine-estimated wait never triggers an alert — if your phone buzzes, a human being actually crossed and told us how long it took.
- If reports dry up, the alert freezes. No new data isn't the same as "the queue cleared", and we won't pretend otherwise.
- No flapping. A wait hovering right on your threshold can't buzz you twenty times: once an alert has fired, it only re-arms after the wait has clearly moved back, there's a quiet period afterwards, and there's a hard cap on how many you can get in a day.
- You get a line, not a lecture. The crossing, the direction, the number. Tap it and you land on that crossing's page.
That's the whole feature. Set your threshold once, put the phone in your pocket, and let the border come to you.
Oh, and one more thing worth remembering: the alert that reaches you is only possible because somebody ahead of you spent ten seconds reporting their wait. When you get through, pass it on.