The Bureau of Immigration (BI) expects about 1.5 million passenger arrivals this month until Dec. 31 due to “a major increase in travelers in 2023.”
It said that during the second quarter of 2023, “the BI started recording around one million arrivals per month, a far cry from the less than 100,000 arrivals per month during the height of the pandemic.”
It also said that “the total number of arriving passengers for the entire year is already 79 percent higher than in 2022.”
Just last November, it noted that there was “a total of 1,160,699 arriving passengers, almost half of whom were foreign nationals.”
It pointed out that the increase in the number of passenger arrivals reflects “the aggressive tourism campaign of the government is working.”
At the same time, it said that there was an increase in the number of outbound passengers.
Last November, it said it recorded almost 1.1 million departures, “a figure already very close to the 1.3M recorded in November 2019.”