Keeping channels open for talks

Our border control authorities are bracing for the heavy traffic of travelers flocking to 2airports with the Christmas holiday season.

- MARICHU A. VILLANUEVA

According to our Bureau of Immigration (BI), the agency anticipates this year’s volume of holiday travelers coming in and out of our country to be another rush to the airports. After all, the fastest mode of travel is still via airplane.

The BI anticipates more than 110,000 travelers per day during this year’s holiday season. The agency recorded an average of 53,000 people arrived while an average of 43,000 people departed from the Philippines during the Christmas weekend in 2023. In fact, Immigration Commissioner Joel Anthony Viado estimates this year’s arrivals and departures could “exceed” similar figures in 2019 when it averaged 55,000 daily arrivals and 47,000 daily departures.

This was the period before the COVID-19 pandemic and before the Philippines closed down all its borders.

A few years after the pandemic was declared over, it has been an uphill climb for the numbers of foreign tourist arrivals in the Philippines. The country’s tourism and its downstream industries – from travel and tour agencies, to hotels, resorts, restaurants, transport and other industries dependent on tourism – suffered the most during the pandemic period. Given the many economic multipliers of the tourism industry, our country’s economy shrunk to its lowest and even reached negative growth.

It was hence a tall order for the administration of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. (PBBM) to turn the wheels of the tourism industry into full gear. This task is principally upon the shoulders of the Department of Tourism (DOT) headed by Secretary Christina Garcia-Frasco. As a Cabinet member who heads a national agency that is a vital cog in the economic wheels of the country, Frasco must live up to the expectations of PBBM.