Alexandra Eala: The reality of travel and difficulty of securing visas with a Philippine passport

Alexandra Eala couldn't be prouder of her heritage, a fact that was on full show last month at the Miami Open, where she became the first player from the Philippines to reach the semifinals of a WTA 1000 event, and with it, crack the Top 100.

Having cut her ranking in half as a result of her Miami exploits, where she upset Australian Open champion Madison Keys and world No. 2 Iga Swiatek en route to the final four, Eala will now enjoy the fruits that come with being in that ranking range, including direct entry to the biggest tournaments.

But there's one thing that Eala says is a challenge of being a citizen of the archipelagic nation of nearly 115 million: securing visas with her passport.

"What's challenging is being able to travel with flexibility," Eala said last week, speaking to Philippine media in the aftermath of her Miami run. "As a tennis player, you need to be very flexible with your schedule. You're going to make a lot of last-minute choices, and it doesn't allow you time to organize all of this—every single time—to have the visas ready."

As of 2025, the Philippine passport ranks 74th in the Henley Passport Index, which since 2005 has rated travel freedoms for the world. Eala and other citizens of the Philippines are afforded visa-free or visa-on-arrival travel to only 65 countries and territories. Though she is based at Rafael Nadal's namesake tennis academy in Mallorca, Spain, the 19-year-old needs a visa in advance of traveling to the location of the four Grand Slam tournaments (Australia, France, Great Britain and the United States), as well as Asian swing hub China, just to name a few.

Read more: When and where is Alexandra Eala playing next?

But despite the challenges posed to her traveling, Eala says she wouldn't trade the intagibles that come from being Filipina for anything, including the fan support from the country's diaspora that has followed her across the globe.

In 2013, the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) estimated that more than 10 million people of Filipino descent live or work abroad, and in 2023, more than 4.6 million of these could be found in the United States—the site of Eala's two biggest career achievements to date. (In 2022, she won the junior US Open singles title.)

"You cannot find that kind of community anywhere else, in my opinion," she confessed.

The left-hander will take her new Top 100 ranking, a perch of No. 72, into this week's WTA 125 event in Oeiras, Portugal, where she is the top seed.