PINOYS are feeling less confident to make travel plans these days, according to the latest Finder’s Travel Index.
As of September, only 22 percent of Filipinos surveyed said they planned to travel in the next three months, compared to 35 percent in August. According to data, September recorded the lowest percentage of Filipinos making short-term travel plans since Finder’s Index was started in February this year. Finder is a personal finance and consumer products comparison web site.
Finder’s editor at large Angus Kidman attributed the sudden travel hesitancy of Filipinos to the tightening of quarantine restrictions, which lasted from August 6 to September 15. “Our September survey coincided with the extension of enhanced quarantine guidelines, so it’s not at all surprising that fewer Filipinos are making travel plans.”
But with the easing of pandemic travel restrictions in many areas, “it will be interesting to see if this leads to an uptick in travel interest next month, or if we’ll see another decline as Filipinos decide to put travel plans on hold until the Covid situation improves.”
Metro Manila was hit the most by the lockdown. Sadly, many leisure destinations in the country are dependent on Metro Manila residents for their respective tourist arrivals. So even when many of them were already under less restrictions, having been put on general community quarantine or modified GCQ status, they still recorded a massive decrease in the number of guests.
Last August, for example, only 24 tourists arrived on Boracay Island. This surged immediately to 5,732 from September 1 to 28 with close to 70 percent coming from Metro Manila.
Those arrivals are still far from the normal number of tourist arrivals in Boracay, which at one time reached close to 1 million in just domestic guests. For sure, there continues to be a real fear among most Pinoys of getting sick with the Delta variant of the coronavirus, aside from the fact they provably have less extra income to spend for holidays with family and friends.
As per Department of Health data, Covid-positive cases continue to be recorded, though perhaps growing at a slower rate. We hear of so many cases among friends and colleagues who are vaccinated but becoming sick, even being hospitalized, because of Covid-19.
Finder noted that in the previous seven months, the percentage of Filipino adults making short term travel plans hovered between 35 percent and 43 percent. So it was quite a surprise that in September, less than a third of the population have made travel plans. (As per its previous indexes, the survey in the Philippines was carried out via “convenience sampling.” This means those surveyed were easy to contact, and were willing to be surveyed. As such, it does not represent a national sample. There were 2,003 respondents to the survey, which was conducted in the first week of September.)
Kidman said that of all the 12 countries they surveyed, the Philippines had recorded the steepest decline in the number of people planning to travel. “Since we began this survey, travel plans in the Philippines have consistently been higher than almost all other countries included in the research.”
He noted that in August, for instance, “the Philippines had the highest percentage of people planning travel of all 12 countries, despite experiencing an eight-percentage point drop in travel interest from July.”
Countries like the United States, Australia and Hong Kong, on the other hand, posted drops of just 1 to 5 percentage points in September. Other countries, including South Africa, Singapore and India, saw slight increases in the percentage of people making plans in the next three months.
Finder’s survey indicated that only 15 percent of Filipino respondents were planning a domestic holiday in September, compared to 25 percent in August. Also, only 9 percent said they were planning to travel abroad in the next three months, compared to 14 percent who responded in August.
Interestingly enough, more men (at 27 percent) said they were planning to travel in the next three months, compared to just 19 percent among women. In Finder’s July travel index, there was almost an equal number of men (48 percent) and women (43 percent) respondents who were planning to travel from August to October.
What is clear is that mass vaccination will help ease the travel hesitancy of Filipinos, not just the removal of lockdowns. And while airlines like Air Asia Philippines are supportive of moves to remove RT-PCR tests as a travel requirement for the vaccinated, I personally think it is still too early for that. Even if one is vaccinated, one can still be a Covid carrier. Rightly so, many local government units (LGU), like Bohol, Boracay and El Nido, continue to require a RT-PCR test regardless of a tourist’s vaccination status.
This is because many cities and provinces have yet to reach herd immunity. Not because their residents don’t want to get jabbed, but because there continues to be a supply problem, with government not allowing LGUs to purchase their own vaccines. And while the Department of Tourism has been able to fast-track the vaccination of tourism workers, this is not equivalent to the entire population. In the Phuket Sandbox experiment, for instance, their benchmark in reopening their doors was the vaccination of 70 percent of the entire island’s population, not just its tourism workers.
So let’s vaccinate more, so we can finally travel and celebrate.
Image courtesy of Ismail Mohamed-Sovile on Unsplash