MILLENNIALS make up most of the inbound tourists of the Philippines, aligning with the Department of Tourism’s (DOT) promotions program, which recently has been focusing on social-media campaigns.
In an online presser on Monday, DOT OIC-Director for Tourism Development Planning, Research and Research Management Warner Andrada said the average age of foreign tourists in the country last year was 36.69, citing arrival/departure cards of the Bureau of Immigration.
In its annual visitor sample survey, the DOT also found out that 69.3 percent of foreign tourists in 2020 were “repeat visitors,” and the rest were first-time visitors. Also 96.4 percent of those surveyed last year made “independent travel arrangements,” and only 3.6 percent used package tours.
As per the BI arrival/departure cards, Andrada also reported that 54.11 percent of last year’s visitors came here for holiday/leisure, 2.61 percent for business trips, and 1.08 percent for health/medical purposes. He failed to give comparative 2019 findings.
Jose C. Clemente III, president of Rajah Tours Philippines told the BusinessMirror, he disagreed with some of DOT’s findings. “We still get our fair share of tourists. Millennials have lower budgets so they find it expensive to go through agents. So they probably do direct bookings thinking they will be able to save. I’d like to see how they [DOT] extracted that finding.”
The Covid-19 pandemic cut the momentum of tourism growth in the country, with inbound arrivals falling by 82 percent, a far cry from the DOT’s 9.2-million target for 2020. Inbound receipts were 83 percent lower at P82.24 billion, significantly off the targeted P661 billion for 2020.
Investments continue
Meanwhile, the Philippine Statistics Authority reported in the same briefing that investments in the tourism sector, as expressed by the gross fixed capital formation (GFCF), slumped by 28.8 percent to some P431 billion in 2020. This is a turnaround from the 10-percent increase in tourism investments in 2019 to P605.2 billion.
The sector, however, accounted for a slightly higher contribution to total investments in the country at 11.3 percent, compared to 10.7 percent in 2019. But overall, the average growth rate of these investments in the tourism sector from 2012 to 2020 slipped slightly to 14.2 percent, versus the 19.3-percent average growth rate from 2012 to 2019, prior to the pandemic. Tourism GFCF represents total government and private investments in the sector.
Based on the recent pronouncements of many international hospitality groups such as Radisson, Accor, RedDoorz, and the like, investments of their local partners have been continuing as they expand their respective footprints in the country.
Earlier, the PSA announced that Covid-19 had drastically cut the performance of the tourism sector, with the Tourism Direct Gross Value Added (TDGVA) shriveling by 61.2 percent in 2020. This was the largest reduction in TDGVA recorded in the agency’s Philippine Tourism Satellite Accounts. (See, “PSA: Worst performance for tourism, courtesy of Covid,” in the BusinessMirror, July 17, 2021.)