The big slash in budget allocation for programs and projects of the Department of Tourism (DOT) for this year has placed the government’s tourism arrival target in jeopardy, an official said on Sunday, Jan. 12.
Another tourism goal setback, according to DOT Secretary Christina Garcia-Frasco, is the decision to suspend the e-visa policy for Chinese travelers—which came amid the controversy surrounding the Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs).
According to Frasco, the DOT’s branding and promotion programs was the biggest casualty under the General Appropriations Act (GAA) after its funding was slashed from what it proposed under the National Expenditure Program (NEP) for this year.
The DOTs budget for branding and promotion program, which targets the international market, took the biggest budget cut last year—from P1.2 billion in 2023 down to P200 million in 2024.
And from the P500 million budget as proposed by the DOT for 2025, Frasco said it was cut down to only P100 million.
Based on the DOT data, the Philippines received a total of 5,949,350 international visitors and overseas Filipinos in 2024.
While it was higher by 9.15 percent than the 5,450,557 foreign tourists in 2023, the 2024 figure was lower than the DOT’s projection of 7.7 million tourist arrivals under the National Tourism Development Plan (NTDP) 2023-2028.
Frasco said they are now anticipating a big negative impact on tourism arrivals due to a lesser opportunity to market the Philippines in the international community.
“Lower budget for marketing and promotions would definitely test the DOT’s sustained efforts to make the Philippines more attractive to international visitors. The challenge of a very limited funding for branding and promotions is the difficulty of making sure that the presence of the Philippines on the consciousness of potential travelers in markets around the world are always there,” said Frasco.
“Not only the DOT’s ‘Love the Philippines’ tourism campaign will be affected, but also our destinations themselves will ultimately be the recipients of promotions being done by the DOT,” she added.
Need for e-visa policy
Frasco said the decision to suspend the e-visa policy for Chinese travelers was in stark contrast to the policies of our ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) neighbors.
The DOT consistently advocated for the implementation of electronic visa or e-visa programs especially for potential tourism markets such as China.
“Nobody could have anticipated that geopolitics would ultimately seep into arrivals from China, considering that the electronic visa or e-visa for the Chinese market were suspended,” said Frasco.
“This is a serious challenge because originally what we projected is upwards to 2 million Chinese tourist arrivals but by the end of 2024, it was just a little over 300,000. This negative recovery has gravely impacted our ability to reach our target,” she added.
From the 1,743,309 travelers from China that visited the Philippines in 2019, the DOT recorded only 170,432 in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic restricted travel, to a plunge of 9,674 in 2021, 39,627 in 2022, 263,836 in 2023, and 312,222 in 2024, based on tallies from the DOT.
What now?
Despite the said challenges, Frasco declared the agency was firm in its commitment to ensure the continuous increase in tourism arrivals in the country.
“In the wake of these challenges and many other matters beyond our control, we will work hard. We diversified our tourism products, we focused on our top source markets, and we made sure that we have high tourism spending,” said Frasco.