LAST year, for the first time in the history of Philippine tourism, the number of visitor arrivals in the country reached 3.9 million, more than 11 per cent higher than the 3.5 million arrivals posted in 2010.
Last month, as Philippine officials rushed to take credit for the record-breaking statistics, they went on to predict even greater success. The initiatives taken by former tourism secretary Albert Lim, said current Tourism Secretary Ramon Jimenez, contributed to the milestone. And "with the overwhelming response to our new brand campaign launched last month, we know that we have broken (new) ground on crowd sourcing".
Sadly, the optimism is almost certainly misplaced.
Since taking office in June 2010, President Benigno Aquino has made developing the tourist industry a priority. A national tourism development plan has been drawn up, and the president recently announced that his administration aimed to attract 10 million tourists to the country annually by the time his term of office ends in 2016.
There is plenty of room for improvement. Despite the Philippines having a plethora of beautiful beaches and no shortage of well-preserved historical sites or Mardi Gras-style celebrations, its tourist industry still lags far behind those of its regional rivals.
Despite devastating floods, Thailand welcomed more than 19 million international visitors last year. The figure represented an annual growth of 20 per cent, a much faster increase than Manila could manage from a much lower base. Similar, but less dramatic, increases in tourist arrivals were recorded in Malaysia and Indonesia.
All this suggests that the "success" chalked up by Manila last year can just as easily be attributed to the general increase in tourist arrivals across the region as to the activities of Philippine tourism officials.
So what is holding the country back? One possibility is that the national effort has been sidetracked by a debate over how the country should be promoted. Soon after Mr Aquino took office, the Department of Tourism ditched the eight-year-old "Wow Philippines" campaign and adopted a new slogan – "Pilipinas Kay Ganda" (Beautiful Philippines). There was also a colourful new logo, meant to represent a coconut tree, the sun and waves.
The result was a storm of criticism in which detractors pointed out that foreigners did not understand what the tag line meant, even though they were the target of the campaign. But what really drew public ire was the revelation that the logo’s design looked remarkably similar to one used by the tourism authorities in Poland.
Mr Lim tendered his resignation in August last year and was replaced by Mr Jimenez, an advertising executive. Last month, the country began promoting itself with yet another slogan – "It’s more fun in the Philippines!"
This preoccupation with style rather than substance is worrying. More emphasis needs to be placed on removing the practical impediments. The national tourism development plan, which seeks to encourage cooperation between government agencies and private industry players in order to improve the country’s infrastructure, needs greater emphasis.
Government policies should also be better aligned. Officials recently eased restrictions on foreign airlines servicing airports outside Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport in an attempt to attract more carriers to the country.
Fearing revenue loss, however, the government has been reluctant to reduce its heavy taxes on foreign airlines. The result has been a progressive decline in international linkages. KLM recently announced that it was ceasing all direct flights to the Philippines, thus eliminating the sole remaining direct connection to Europe.
But perhaps the greatest impediment to any substantial increase in foreign tourist arrivals is the perceived lack of personal security. The most serious setback was the fiasco in August last year, when a disgraced former policeman took a busload of Hong Kong tourists hostage in Manila. A botched rescue operation resulted in the deaths of eight.
The country’s reputation for lawlessness was reinforced in November when Australia, Britain, Canada, France, New Zealand and the United States issued advisories warning of an imminent terror attack in the capital. No such attack took place, but the travel warning almost certainly kept away prospective visitors.
More recently, the country’s reputation has been tarnished by a series of kidnappings involving foreigners. Criminal gangs are also believed to operate at the airport in Manila.
Officials sometimes cite statistics to show that these events have little or no immediate effect on tourism numbers, when a more realistic assessment might be that only the most hardy tourists go to the country in the first place.
According to the National Statistical Coordination Board, the tourism sector accounted for about 5.8 per cent of gross domestic product annually between 2000 and 2010. Improving on that figure will require much more than clever marketing strategies.