One warning: Unless you live near a major international airport hub (usually on the coast), getting an appointment for your Global Entry interview can be next to impossible as they simply do not have much staff at the GE offices at many of the midwest airports. My family applied (3 of us), and the only airport within 500 miles with a GE office was Denver (DIA). The earliest we could schedule an appointment was more than 10 months out! Plus, because you had to create and log into three separate accounts (1 for each of us) to schedule an appointment, there was no way to get three appointments in a row. The best I could do is two appointments about 3 hours apart, and the third had to be on a different day, which meant two trips to the airport, about 2 hour round trip each time.
And to add to that, the TSA agents at DIA were so incompetent that they screwed up and never processed my application after my interview -- my wife's and my daughter's was processed fine. And forget about trying to get anyone to help you over the phone -- it is impossible to get through to customer service (as in, the line rings for a while and then you get the old "this number cannot be reached at this time" message; and I tried for WEEKS to get through!). In the end, we were vacationing in Marco Island a few months after my first interview, and I was able to make an appointment at Miami airport, so we had to take a full day out of our vacation, drive 2.5 hours each way to Miami for my second interview. On the positive side, the Miami staff were great and fixed the issue right away.
If renewing my Global Entry in 5 years requires another interview, I will switch to TSA Pre. It is just not worth the hassle for me.
Kurt
My experience was also almost as painful as Kurt's. DW and I applied about 6 months before a trip to Japan, erroneously thinking it would be plenty of time to get the application processed. Wrong. No appts in the SF Bay area for 10 months. Had to travel without it. On return, we were going to Chicago to visit family, and we managed to get an interview scheduled at ORD. That went fairly well, at least for DW. Like Kurt, they neglected to process mine, too. And it's true, that it's almost impossible to contact them by phone. After waiting a month or two, I did manage to contact them via email from their web site though. Heard nothing back for almost 2 weeks, and then suddenly I was processed. No explanation, but it ended well.
I'm glad to hear that renewal is easy. Otherwise, like Kurt, I might just have switched to TSA Pre.