Tourism promotion

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January 5, 2026 | 12:00am

The tourism secretary was bashed over the year-end for having her glamorous photo on the cover of a magazine at a time when she has dismally failed in her job of promoting our tourism industry.

That the magazine is privately owned misses the point. That it is owned by an advertising firm leads to suspicion the cover could be a quid-pro-quo for a share of the tourism department’s promotions budget. She should have refused and asked them to feature one of our many tourism spots that are infinitely more photogenic than her.

We are expected to record only 5.6 million foreign tourist arrivals in 2025 or just about as much as 2024’s. That falls short of the 8.4 million target the fiasco-plagued DOT proudly announced at the beginning of 2025.

The DOT folks obviously don’t know what they are doing. Before making bold targets, any professional marketing person would make sure it is attainable and that they will not embarrass their principal if they fail.

It is easy to make an ambitious target by picking a number from thin air. But it doesn’t work. It takes competence to make sure the target is met.

If the folks at DOT were working for a private marketing company, they would all be fired by now. Unfortunately, incompetent bureaucrats have civil service protection.

They have a tough job, no doubt about that. Our tourism sector had never been competitive, not on price, not on ease of moving around and not on the national image of prevalent corruption and iffy peace and order.

That’s why I have always been saying that DOT should first work on the basics. First on the list, let our prices be competitive. Price is the first consideration most people have before deciding where to go.

My Singapore-based son is a Hyatt loyalist and he told me the Hyatt rate in Manila is a lot higher than what we paid in Kuala Lumpur over the holidays.

Then we need more international flights directly to the tourist destinations. Why waste time and money and risk high blood pressure to go to a beach in the Visayas via Manila?

The destination with the best potential in Palawan for visitors is El Nido. But the airport that can handle an A320 is in Puerto Prinsesa, a day’s hard land travel away. The airstrip in El Nido is limited and airfares are very expensive.

While conditions at NAIA have improved considerably since San Miguel took over operations in September 2024, much work must still be done. The neglect over the years cannot be fixed overnight.

Still, I was happy to exit NAIA Terminal 1 in less than 30 minutes when I arrived from KL last week. Baggage retrieval was quick. The arrival area was properly air conditioned. And best of all, SMC opened to the public what used to be the VIP arrival ramp. I didn’t have to use that dangerously steep incline to reach the previously designated pickup point for the hoi polloi.

But until SMC completes the construction from scratch of a new terminal at Nayong Pilipino, NAIA will be stretching the limits of its 35-million annual passenger capacity. In 2025, NAIA already handled 52,020,551 passengers. Unfortunately, only so much can be done by retrofitting NAIA. We need the Bulacan airport.

Educating the LGUs on managing tourism as an industry is a must. Environmental planner Paulo Alcazaren had this post on Facebook over the weekend:

“The streets of Panglao tonight- messy and unfriendly: Duterte shut down Boracay after it slunk to its lowest point as a tourist destination...blighted, noisy, polluted, unsafe for pedestrians, lacking in basic services and amenities. It cost the government over
P4 billion to fix it in two years.

“Five years later the improvements are wearing thin, after it was turned back to the LGU, which has a vague idea of the concept of maintenance.

“Worse, none of the lessons from Boracay have been applied by the DOT or the DPWH to any other tourist destination in the country! They are ALL sinking in a miasma of government negligence. How do we entice more people to visit us then?”

Indeed, Panglao is going the way of Boracay. No sanitary treatment plant or STP and that leads to serious environmental damage and health threat. Panglao’s local governance is weak with officials who own resorts and are only interested in profits now with no regard for the future.

DOT’s infrastructure investment arm, TIEZA, should prioritize providing STPs in key tourism destinations. Coron and Siargao, for instance. Water contamination has made singer Celeste Legaspi and her party sick in an onshore resort at El Nido.

The Philippine Tourism Congress must seriously work with their members to provide better value for the tourist money. Our hotel rates are among the most expensive in the region. Restaurants in Boracay are priced like BGC or Greenbelt Makati.

Then, given our reputation, police visibility in tourist areas must be high.

The Aboitiz Infrastructure Group must have a program to attract more airlines to fly to Mactan Cebu and Panglao. Megawide used to join or initiate marketing missions to Japan, South Korea and other countries. That’s how Mactan started getting more international flights.

We are getting the reputation for fees… Fee-lippines na daw. The LGUs shouldn’t kill the goose laying the golden eggs by imposing too many fees on visitors but neglecting their job of keeping their areas clean and friendly.

One last thing… that eTravel app should be revised. It is too difficult to complete. It requires so many OTPs which expire quickly and it takes time for a new one. Why not just the basic information for the trip, like Singapore and Malaysia? The security measures in eTravel are useless for CIQ purposes.

It is embarrassing to be ASEAN’s kulelat in tourism, despite all those so-called awards for being destination of the year, daw. Did we just pay for big sponsorships to get those awards?

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco