TRAVELMillions Still Pay $199 a Year for CLEAR But Is It Finally Breaking Down5 min read
The Program That Promised to Fix Airports
For a decade and a half, CLEAR sold a simple dream: skip the ID check, sail to the front, get on with your life. You scan your eyes or your face, a cheerful agent escorts you past the masses, and you’re through. No fumbling for a driver’s license. No reading glasses required. It was frictionless in a world defined by friction.
That dream is getting harder to hold onto. With 25 million members paying $199 a year — a price that jumped on August 1 — CLEAR is facing the most sustained skepticism of its existence. Longer lines. More ID checks. Competing tech from the airlines themselves. The question isn’t just whether CLEAR is worth the money. It’s whether CLEAR still does what CLEAR is supposed to do.
TSA PreCheck Changed the Game First
When CLEAR launched its first airport lane in 2010, it had the expedited security space largely to itself. That ended in 2013 when TSA rolled out PreCheck nationwide. The government program is structurally different: it’s a Trusted Traveler designation, which means a separate lane where shoes stay on, laptops stay in bags, and belts stay buckled. TSA’s own data puts average wait times at under 10 minutes.
Then came Touchless ID — a biometric layer that United and Delta have built on top of PreCheck at select airports. Travelers enrolled in PreCheck flying those carriers can now breeze through security using facial recognition alone, no ID or boarding pass required. At O’Hare, United flyers can even check bags the same way. It’s fast, it’s free, and it works with PreCheck you already have.
CLEAR and Touchless ID don’t merge. That’s the catch most people miss. A CLEAR member with PreCheck gets escorted to the front of the PreCheck line after biometric verification. A Touchless ID user picks one lane or the other. For Delta and United loyalists who already have PreCheck, the calculus is shifting — why pay $199 when your airline handles the biometrics for nothing?