Philippine Passport application for infants

We are planning to travel with the baby this year so we decided to apply for his passport. That way, we won't have any problems with getting one once we find ourselves a good deal on a travel package. We trekked to SM Megamall, where the Department of Foreign Affairs has a satellite office. If you have a car, it is best to park on the 5th floor of Carpark C, this is in front of the mall where the bus stops are.The office will be a short walk from here.

Here are the steps you need to follow:

1. Make sure that you have all your requirements. For us, all we needed to bring were the following:

•  NSO copy of my son's birth certificate
• photocopy of parents' passport ID
• marriage certificate (we brought a photocopy as well as original too be sure)

2. Set an appointment through the DFA website. Since we are applying for an infant's (below one year old) passport, we did not have to set an appointment.

3. Go to the DFA office and get in line to get a number for the electronic queue. If applying for an infant, you will be allowed to cut in line and will be asked to fill out a form before you get the number. Once your form is checked, you will be asked to go to the processing area where you are to line up in front of the priority lanes windows 2 and 3. Don't sit there and wait for your number to be called on the screen because it won't. And for some reason there are people who are in the priority area who aren't priority at all so it may be confusing. I was observing the people around me and saw that the person who had the number before me went up the window already so I made sure that I was next. Our papers were verified and we were given a piece of paper that should be brought to the payments section. You will be asked if you want your passport to be expedited or not. We were not in a hurry so we opted for the regular processing which was Php 950 versus the expedited request which was Php 1200.

4. Payment

We asked if we should also pay for delivery here and the lady said that we should request that after the encoding step. Were you wondering why we were given a number when it was not being flashed in the screen? I was too until we got to the payment step and we were asked to go back to the window that processed our documents and tell the processor to enter the number/information on the paper. So may purpose pa rin sya :)

5. Encoding

This was the last step for us. This is where your information is encoded and the picture taken. It was such a hassle as the person who assisted us basically asked us to dictate to her the information she needed to type in instead of looking at the form we very legibly wrote on.

There was box for the baby to sit on for the picture taking. Baby was not too fussy and we got a good picture quickly but he was not smiling. If it were up to me, I'd request another picture but the staff might get irritated :p

The time stamp on our number said 10:14 AM and we got out of there by 10:32 AM. 18 minutes! That's what it took us to finish the process. Technically, we were probably there a little over 20 minutes since we did have to fill out that form before we got our number. Even so, this is the fastest time I ever dealt with the government. The staff were efficient and polite. The temperature inside was comfortable. I would say this is the best experience I had with applying for a government ID. Kudos to DFA for adding satellite offices!

Datu at lunch after our passport application