Good news and bad news on tourism

The summer vacation season is upon us and this week, Manila will once again be nearly emptied as people troop to vacation spots here and abroad. In fact, the crowd at the NAIA 2 check in counter was rather thick when we took our Singapore flight. It seems people are taking their Holy Week vacations rather early.

With an increasing number of Pinoys traveling the world as tourists, the tourism people led by Bertie Lim should expect an increasingly critical and knowledgeable public in so far as the quality of their work promoting our tourism industry is concerned. And because more and more of us are buying airline tickets on line and must therefore pay our tourism taxes with hard cash at the airport rather than buried in the price of a ticket, we are feeling more and more cheated with what we are getting in return.

That is also why the grumbling of Pinoys about our embarrassing airport is also getting louder in the hallways of ultra modern terminals like the one here in Singapore. The mumblings I overheard last week had to do with the report about NAIA 1 being the worst airport in Asia and fifth worst in the world. That’s the lingering bad news we can’t seem to get rid of.

But there is good news too... courtesy of Google. The Philippines has ranked on top of a list of resorts on worldwide Google search for “resorts”. Our county also made it to the Top 10 of three different lists related to the words vacation,summer and beach in worldwide results of Google’s summer search. On all the lists the Philippines was the highest ranked in Asia.

I guess that confirms that we have the basics of a good tourism industry. The fact that we are attracting just three million tourists a year compared to the over 20 million for countries in our region means we are doing a pretty lousy job of promoting our country.

We still have to hear from Bertie what his plans are. Somehow, no matter how much I want to give Bertie the benefit of the doubt, he honestly doesn’t seem to know what to do... as he tried to dissociate himself from yet another lousy logo controversy.

Now that he got his Open Skies and with the Google search results showing we have strong potential... I hope we get no more excuses from Mr Lim. Sayang kasi all the opportunities a thriving tourism industry could bring.

Source = philstar