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The Grueling Ordeal of Renewing a Philippine Passport

I went to the Department of Foreign Affairs to renew my passport which is expiring in about 14 months. It was almost 4 years since I’ve been there, it was March of 2005 when I applied for the renewal of my travel document, it was my 4th, and believe me, getting a passport in the Philippines is not an easy task.

As always, I left home early, 4AM to be exact, my estimated travel time is about an hour and a half. I was not surprise to see the magnitude of people already waiting inside the DFA basketball court. When my application was stamped, it was at the 1300+, can you imagine how early the first person came to that office?

Although the process (still) involves long lines, I can say that it’s better than my previous experience. From step 1 (stamping) until encoding was done in more or less 2 hours (maybe less for others), better than almost 4 hours that I’ve experienced in 2005.

I can see that there’s still room for improvement & I hope that DFA officials will see & implement those.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Daily Rants, Personal, Pilipinas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “The Grueling Ordeal of Renewing a Philippine Passport”

  1. I also have the impression they try to improve their system… and I can clearly see improvements if I compare with 15 years ago… ;-)

  2. ang hirap nga poh kumuha ng passport, biruin mo eh 10am nandun kami, mga 2pm naku natapos.. aikz. pero worth it naman.. :) haba ng pila sa encoding eh.. kapag kumukuha pa lang. pero renew madali lang ng onte.. :)

  3. [...] was the releasing date of my new passport that I applied last January 20, 2009, the releasing time was from 1PM to 4PM, amazingly, it took me just 5 minutes to get the passport! [...]

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