Philippine tourism outperforms pre-pandemic figures in 2024

The Philippine Department of Tourism (DOT) reports that 2024 was an exceptional year for the country as it outperformed 2019 figures in terms of tourist receipts.

During the department’s year-end briefing on 17th December, tourism secretary Christina Frasco reported that the Philippines earned over US$12 billion from tourist spending since January of this year.

This represents a 119 percent recovery from last year’s figures and significantly higher than the over US$10 billion last seen in 2019.

Frasco said: “We have the highest tourism per capita spend within ASEAN at over US$2,000, and we have seen that over 70 percent of the tourists that come into the country are repeat visitors.”

She added that the department anticipates that this will expand further as the country now offers a more diverse range of destinations, attractions, and tourism products.

Meeting targets

The Philippines targets to reach at least 7.7 million foreign tourists by year-end, a number now seemingly unlikely to be achieved with arrivals still at 5.64 million as of 15th December.

Frasco nevertheless pointed out that the sector had faced numerous challenges since the projections were announced.

These included inflationary pressures, geopolitical issues, climate-related disasters, and other developments over which the department had no control.

Thanks to these, as well as delays in the liberalisation of visa processing for the Chinese market, the DOT has opted to be more pragmatic in terms of its targets.

Frasco said: “While it has been the practice to only look at arrivals and automatically compare with our competitors as the singular measure of performance, I would urge a wider perspective on the full faculty of facts. Focus on the numbers that matter: visitor receipts, tourism spend, length of stay, tourism employment, for these are what drive our economy and employ our people, and in all of these numbers, the Philippines is doing exceptionally well.”