By TARA YAP
Boracay Island – The scheduled shutdown of Boracay Island on April 26 was met with harsh reaction from foreigners who, at the moment, are still enjoying its beauty.
“They are going about it in an extreme way,” said Lee de Picciotto from Los Angeles, California, United States.
“There are ways to clean it up without closing it down completely. They should close it by section that allows people to continue working and visiting here,” he added.
Thomas Dalton from England laments the seeming lack of planning regarding the shutdown.
“The government does not have a clear action plan. I’ve talked to waiters and residents here. They don’t know what will happen,” he said.
Dalton is wondering how the government plans to implement the shutdown, asking “Will they have to bring in the military to force people to leave?”
As the closure nears, Dalton noted certain resorts and restaurants on the island have refused serving certain food items citing how management are not ordering new stocks.
Asked if they think the shutdown would bode well for Boracay, de Piccitto said, “The whole energy and the vibe of the island will change. Maybe they clean it up, but Boracay won’t be the same anymore.”
Meanwhile, business conglomerates operating on the island are still hoping for a reversal of the ordered shutdown, warning total closure will have an adverse effect in the entire country’s tourism industry.
“The backlash from a total closure would certainly be felt for years and we all know that this will most definitely affect not only Boracay’s tourism industry, but the entire country’s tourism as a whole,” Boracay Foundation Inc. (BFI) noted in a recent statement.
“Boracay is a brand name, which the community painstakingly worked passionately to be recognized worldwide,” it added.
Of the country’s 6.6 million tourists last year, more than 2 million tourists cited Boracay as main destination.
The 1,032-hectare resort island also contributed P56 billion to the Philippine economy for fiscal year 2017.
This influx of tourists was largely credited to decades of painstaking promotion of the island not only domestically, but abroad.
Boracay continues to be marketable to Chinese, South Koreans, Europeans and American tourists.
“Marketing the island has cost us billions in financial investments, not to mention years of campaign to build up the name and reputation of Boracay – hailed as ‘the crown jewel of Philippine tourism’ and one of the world’s best islands,” BFI pointed out.
