Getting a SIM in Iloilo City: One Mall, No Airport Counter, and Day 30

There is one place in Iloilo City to walk into a carrier store, and it is the third floor of SM City Iloilo. Globe publishes exactly one store in the entire province and that is it. Smart’s only recorded Iloilo presence is the same building, listed by the mall rather than by Smart. DITO has a kiosk there and one licensed shop downtown.

The airport will not help you. No SIM counter is published at Iloilo International, and Globe names its pickup points explicitly enough to exclude it.

So the sequence matters more here than in Cebu, and two things decide it: whether you arrive with a number already working, and what happens on day 30.

Where You Can Actually Register

Two things in that table are worth saying out loud.

Nearest Globe stores outside the province are in San Jose, Antique and Roxas City, Capiz. If the SM branch cannot solve your problem, the next Globe counter is a different island province.

One discrepancy is left standing rather than resolved. DITO lists a kiosk at SM City Iloilo’s Cyberzone; SM’s own 405-entry tenant directory for that mall has no DITO record. Both are primary sources. One is stale and we cannot tell which, so expect the kiosk and have the Ledesma store as a fallback.

The Airport Will Not Sell You a SIM

Globe names its Traveler SIM pickup points as NAIA Terminals 1, 2, 3 and 4, Clark International, and Mactan-Cebu International, then adds that travellers going to other cities can buy prepaid SIMs at retail partners nationwide. Iloilo is in the second sentence, not the first.

CAAP’s own concessionaire inventory for the airport enumerates airlines, food services and pasalubong stores across thousands of lines with no telecom category anywhere in it. DITO’s four national store files contain no airport entries at all. None of that proves no stall exists behind a generic listing; it does mean nobody publishes one.

This matters more in Iloilo than it would elsewhere, because most foreigners do not clear immigration here. Iloilo’s international service only restarted in October 2024 and runs to a very short route list, so the usual arrival is a domestic leg from Manila or Cebu, which means you pass a staffed SIM counter hours before you reach the city where you cannot find one. The decision framework works through why that route list is what it is.

Day 30 Is a Document, Not a Wall

Everyone quotes the statute: under RA 11934, a SIM registered by a tourist is valid for thirty days and deactivates automatically. What almost nobody quotes is the implementing rule that says what to do about it.

NTC Memorandum Circular 001-12-2022, Section 4(d), provides that the validity of such a SIM “may be extended only upon presentation or submission by the said foreign national of an approved visa extension.” Section 4(e) adds that foreign nationals on other visa types acquire SIMs without the thirty-day limit at all.

So the day-30 clock and the day-59 immigration clock are the same errand in two buildings, both in Mandurriao. Extend the visa at the Iloilo Immigration District Office at Festive Mall, then take the approved extension to the carrier counter at SM City. A 9(g), 13(a) or retirement-visa holder skips this entirely, which is worth knowing before you spend an afternoon on it.

Registration itself is free, in the regulation’s own words, and both the NTC and DICT run complaint hotlines for people charged for it.

What the Carriers Publish, and What This Site Got Wrong

The Cebu version of this page used to say Globe and Smart publish no retrievable prices. That was true of a live fetch and it is not true in general. Both pages now carry the same position and the same figures; this is where the working was done.

Two corrections follow from that, and both are ours.

The position that only DITO’s sheet is checkable does not hold: Globe’s prices are readable from captures of Globe’s own pages, and Smart’s from a storefront subdomain nobody had tried. And DITO’s Traveler SIM allowances, once described here as unreadable, are legible in the tier graphics once you download them.

The important detail is one neither page had. DITO’s Traveler SIM is valid thirty days and its inclusions are not. The PHP 300 tier carries seven days of data and calls, the PHP 500 tier fifteen, and only the PHP 1,000 tier runs the full thirty. The cheapest tier is a one-week product in a month-long wrapper, and the price ladder tells you nothing about that.

Two things still cannot be checked and this page publishes neither: what Smart’s four ALL-NEW Plans+ tiers include, which Smart’s own catalogue leaves blank, and any coverage or speed figure for Iloilo City from any carrier or from the regulator.

The Order to Do This In

1. Buy an eSIM before you fly if you are landing after about 8pm, or if you need a working number on arrival for a booking or a bank.
2. Otherwise go to SM City Iloilo, third floor, with your passport, a Philippine address and your return ticket. All three carriers are there and nothing else official is.
3. Do not detour to Robinsons Place for this. It has none of the three, though it does have PhilSys, DFA, SSS and PhilHealth on one floor, which the first-month checklist sequences.
4. Diary day 30 against your visa date, not separately. The extension that keeps you in the country is the document that keeps the number alive.
5. If you take the DITO PHP 300 tier, read it as a seven-day product. The SIM lives thirty days; the data does not.

Every figure on this page is registered against the source it came from, on the basis set out in our methodology.