Passport Renewal Adventures

Last May I signed up for a schedule for me to be able to renew my passport.  The schedule that was given to me was July 13 onwards, I opted to choose July 19 since it's the day that I will be reporting back to work from an off.

I woke up around 4:30AM and prepared the documents needed, old passport, NSO birth certs in case they asked me to produce one, application form, reservation letter and xerox copies of them.  I was at the new DFA building around 6:45AM, I just walked from the Airport Road to the DFA Asean building.  I was happy to see that the new buildings has more guards, courteous employees and less/ no fixers at all.  I gave them my application form and showed me where would I fall in line.

I've met a lot of people that day renewing and applying for new passports.  I entered the DFA building around 9AM and lined up on the first step which was the verification process.  DFA personnels provided seats for all of us, it is nice to see that once you are inside the building you would see the that the only person standing are the DFA personnels.

After 5 minutes in waiting I saw myself using the escalator heading to the last 2 steps which is paying the fees and getting myself photographed and enrolled on the system.  Passport application is now done in 3 steps, processing/verification, payment and enrollment. I'm tired of going back on Aug 16, 9-11AM to get my new passport so I had it delivered courtesy of the TeleServ ladies so I went ahead and paid Php 120.00 to one of them to have it delivered.  Passport fee for 20 working days is Php 950.00.

Overall I was really impress with the improvements that the DFA made with regards to the passporting service.