A Little Warning, Dubai Dreamers

(First of Two Parts)

Being where I am now doesn’t make me much of an authority, really, but it affords me a certain touchdown with some realities on the ground.  Thus, for those who look beyond the horizon and dream of working abroad, specifically in Dubai, hear me, please.

If you believe that coming to Dubai would fulfill your dreams for your family, no one can blame you.  Going to Manila to try one’s luck is no different.  Dubai is just farther and is indisputably reputed with promises of more jobs and bigger pays.  Sadly, as in Manila, it isn’t always so.

Many Filipinos come to Dubai on visit/tourist visas hoping to land jobs. As in anywhere else, some are lucky, some fall by the wayside, a few tragically all the way to a hellhole.

Sixty-day visit visas actually do not allow holders to seek jobs.  But unlike other countries, Dubai and the whole UAE allow the conversion of visit visas to work permits.  Only licensed employers can apply for work permits as sponsors for their workers, for a hefty sum.  This was before.

Now the UAE had come up with a mission visa to stem the tide of visit visa holders searching for jobs.  It is meant to protect both employee and employer and can be had only in one’s country of origin.  Say, someone in the Philippines successfully applies for a job in the UAE.  His employer then sponsors and produces his six-month mission visa.

Which brings us to travel agencies.  We’re talking travel agencies here, not placement agencies.

Fellow Boholanos in their professional prime paid me a visit lately.  I can claim relations with them, being relatives of relatives.  My questions about how they came to pursue their dreams were therefore forthright.

They each paid a Bohol-based travel agency 70,000 pesos.   Allowing for current currency exchange rates, let me break this amount down to its uses.  A roundtrip plane ticket goes for an average of 50,400 pesos.  The visit visa costs 2,850 pesos.  Lodging (four to eight bed-spacers in a room) goes from 200 to 450 dirhams per month.  I’ll take the higher rate here, which in pesos is around 10,260 for two months.

These generous estimates that consider higher average costs total 63,510 pesos.  Allowing for the travel agency’s services and profit sharing with its contacts here, an overhead of around 6,490 pesos per head is fair.

The clincher?  The return ticket is a dummy, courtesy of a standard practice between airline outlets and travel agencies.  Clients of this service will have to buy their own ticket for home in case they opt out.

Subtract around 40 percent of the roundtrip ticket cost then.  This gives a travel agency an estimated additional profit of 20,160 pesos.  Add the apparent 6,490 pesos profit, and there’s a fortune by any measure from every client.

Fair enough if the clients know all this.  Most do.  It’s the unreal promises that fall short.  Someone will coordinate the job search.  Their two-month lodgings include amenities like Internet access.  Neither exists, according to my visitors.  You’re already here; make the most of it, was the best encouragement I could muster.

What rankles is the alleged part of the travel agency’s sales pitch that supposedly assured that they wouldn’t be harmed because the consul is a Boholana, the sister of Atty. Aster Piollo.  This here housewife begs to disagree.

Fine, the Cebuano husband is the consul who isn’t without his lion’s share of work-related headaches and heartaches.  And when Filipinos, Boholanos or not, disappear into the woodwork of a fast-paced megalopolis, even a hundred consuls cannot assure them full protection.  Besides, there are local laws and procedures to contend with.

But may I request this agency to desist from dragging my name into its business that strikes me as sanitized human trafficking.  I don’t know this agency or its people, regardless of the names, their contacts, and addresses that I now have.

So here’s to the agency:  You have every right to sell your services, but don’t sell dreams, much less sell them candy-coated.  A possible pay of 175,000 pesos a month?  Hello?  And please don’t sell me.

Heaven forbid that the agency’s yarn about my protection would one day evolve into a scuttlebutt, like my owning a placement agency without my knowing it.  I’m not about to take that sitting down.

(27 April 2008)