DESPITE the closure of Boracay island for six months this year, Philippine tourist arrivals rose 8.5 percent to 4.85 million in the last eight months, the Department of Tourism said this week.
South Korea remained the top source of visitors with 1.06 million. The figure was down by 0.01 percent but it still accounted for 21.84 percent of total arrivals.
China became the second biggest source of visitors with 870,177 – 35.67 percent more than in 2017. It accounted for 17.94 percent of all arrivals.
The United States was the third biggest source of tourists – 715,060, 14.7 percent of all arrivals. The 2018 figure is up 8.2 percent from last year.
The next eight countries in the list were Japan, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and India.
With Boracay closed to tourists all this time, where did these millions of visitors go in the Philippines? International travel magazine Conde Nast Traveler’s readers gave an indication with the findings of its survey among its international readers. They gave Siargao island, with at least 15 surfing sites, as their top pick in the survey.
Boracay was next with its powdery white sand and azure water, along with a thriving night life. In third spot was Palawan. Three Philippine islands and they were the top three picks of the international readers of the Conde Nast Traveler magazine.
Boracay will reopen on October 26 – with officials determined to avoid the abuses that caused its closure six months ago, on April 26. At one time, over 100,000 people were reported staying on the island, nearly double its carrying capacity of 55,000 of both tourists and workers.
The key program is “sustainable tourism,” according to Secretary of Tourism Bernadette Romulo Puyat and it will apply to all of the country’s tourism sites. We have so many more of them in our country’s over 7,000 islands and we are determined that we will not have another Boracay-like experience, not just for our tourist visitors but, more important, for our own people.
