Recently the 1malaysia government reduced the passport renewal fee from the exorbitant RM300 pricetag for 5 years period to the more reasonable price of RM100 for a 2 years period. This is in fact a very encouraging change in my opinion. Hence, i went to renew my passport last 2 weeks.

And the impact of this lower fee is tremendous,at least to me:

Before: I was in a state of shock,denial & unhappiness for last 5 years, just look at my face expression:

Before the fee reduction

After: I look calmer & satisfied thanks to the lower passport fee, see my face expression again:

After the revision of the renewal fee

By the way, I notice that the new (cheaper) passport is not embedded with the microchip at the back cover of it, that we can see at the old passport like this:

The microchip used to be embedded at the back cover of our passport

If I compare the renewal fee before and after, this chip costs us at RM10/year based on the old renewal fee of RM300 for 5 years period while the new one @ RM100 for 2 years. !@#$%^&*(

With the 8kB microchip, which is also a machine-readable passport and ICAO compliant, we need not queue for the immigration clearance but now without it, do we need to? I am not sure……

Anyway, I am flying to China this Monday on a business assignment and rest assured i will tell you if this new passport is still as convenient as before.

On the other hand, our government used to brag around that Malaysia passport is the first in the world to adopt security chip based passport  but now if it is really without it, what is their story this time? Is it because of less demand for Malaysia’s passport or the world is safer now?