Philippines may top tourism target

The Philippines may exceed its 3.8 million target for tourist arrivals this year, Tourism Secretary Alberto Lim told reporters Monday.About 1.3 million visitors from overseas were recorded from January to April, 13 percent higher from the same period last year, Lim said.

Jetstar Asia Airways Pte. Ltd. will begin flying between Darwin, Australia and Manila in the fourth quarter, Lim said. AirAsia Bhd's Philippine venture will also start operations within the last three months of the year, he said.

The AirAsia venture on March 24 said it chose the Clark airport in Pampanga province as hub and said it would offer flights to Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Thailand, Korea and Japan.Lim said the Tourism Department's promotional efforts abroad, especially trade fairs abroad, had paid off.

The department noted an increase in arrivals from all regional markets during the four-month period.East Asia accounted for over half, or 581,551, of the tourist volume in the first four months of the year, up 19 percent year-on-year.

Korea was again the country's top source of tourists, with arrivals increasing 28 percent to 286,018. Korean tourists accounted for almost 22 percent of the total traffic in the Philippines.United States remained at second place with 229,000 visitors, followed by Japan with 129,223.

A study initiated by the World Bank, meanwhile, has called for reforms in the travel and tourism sector to provide more economic opportunities for the Philippines and support the further growth of its services exports.

Services exports as a percentage of total exports increased from 9 percent in 1999 to 21 percent in 2009 in the Philippines. On average, the country's services exports rose 3.6 percent annually during the period, higher than that of Asia as a group which averaged 1.5 percent per year.

Unlike many developing countries, the Philippines has been a net exporter of services since 2006.While service exports of the Philippines have been on the rise, thanks largely to the business process outsourcing boom, the World Bank said further growth could be achieved, if the tourism sector attained competitiveness.

These are among the key findings of the World Bank study titled Exporting Services: A Developing Country Perspective.The report highlighted the importance of developing the tourism sector, which accounts for about 6 to 7 percent of the country's gross domestic product and directly employs about 3.5 million people.

Source = manilastandardtoday