Face to face: Philippines Tourism Minister Wanda Corazon T. Teo

How important is the UK market to the Philippines? 

We are serious in courting the British travel trade and business networks to bring more arrivals and related investments to the Philippines. This country remains as the biggest source of visitor arrivals for the Philippines in Europe.

UK is a trend setter and a very sophisticated market; we deemed it crucial to put our biggest marketing investments here. You must have heard or participated in our high profile consumer activations and digital marketing promotions such as the Ph Tourism Weekend at the Potters Fields, and the London train station domination series in King’s Cross and Waterloo, which is currently ongoing.

We have year-long tactical activities to expand and strengthen our travel trade networks, and overall consumer reach to keep the Philippines as

a top-of-mind destination in Asia for leisure and business travel.

What UK booking trends are you noticing? (numbers, growth, who is travelling and where to?)

Last year, we had over 154,589 visitors from the UK last year. We have had 117,535 arrivals from UK to the Philippines from January to August this year, up by 13.48% from the same period last year.

Despite the current challenges posed by Brexit and devaluation of the British Pound, and other travel and safety issues affecting some cities in Europe, we are sustaining our double digit growth rates in visitor arrivals not only from UK but also from the rest of our market clusters in Europe.

But there will always be issues and challenges confronting the global travel industry.

UK tourism is expected to grow only by 3.3% this 2016 due to Brexit, while Europe outbound is currently slowing down with growth rate of only 2.2%.

Boracay and Palawan have garnered the top one and two spots on 2016 Conde Nast’s “Best Island in the World” list on their Readers Travel Awards. Cebu was able to garner the 5th place on the illustrious list. This marks the third consecutive year that a Philippine island has been voted as the world’s best.

We are buoyed by these citations since Beach Holidays remain the most popular holiday choice with leisure, adventure and diving as remain viable reasons to visit among the British outbound travellers.

As reported by our OTA partners, we are seeing shorter lead times for booking and deciding on their holidays. While our tour operator partners are still relied on for longer lead time and full package holiday trip.

What factors are driving UK demand for the Philippines?

The main decision making factors of UK travellers convincing them to go to the Philippines include the diversity of attractions across our 7,107 islands, wealth of endemic wildlife and flora, having no language barrier and engagement with warm and hospitable people.

With the British being sophisticated travellers, they have likely been to the more popular destinations around Asia and are surprised when they do get to find out about the Philippines that it continues to remain pristine and untouched while complete with all the main tropical attractions.

We also have direct flight service from London to Manila on Philippine Airlines which was upgraded to daily frequency in June 2016 due to growing demand for travel to the Philippines.  This provides convenient access to the British travelers, including the other airlines which operate multiple daily flights to the Philippines via major connecting hubs such as UAE, Hongkong, Singapore, Qatar, China, etc.

What initiatives do you have in place to drive more UK tourism to the destination?

We have had a very busy 2016 not only in UK but across all our major and new opportunity markets around the world. We continue to push to sustain our current growth rate of 13% in terms of foreign visitor arrivals in the Philippines as of August 2016.

For the UK market, we regularly participate in consumer exhibitions such as the Destinations Show and special interest ones like the London Dive Show and the Birmingham Dive Show.

This year, we have had a massive consumer promotional campaign to reach and engage customers directly. We ran a station domination series taking over rail stations, Waterloo and King’s Cross last April and July. This was seen by 9.2 million consumers and commuters both onsite and online.

Last August, we had our Philippine Tourism Weekend from 27-28 where the Philippines took over the entire Potter’s Field beside London Bridge for a whole country showcase. This event drew over 45,000 visitors over the two days.

We are currently running a station domination now at Waterloo until the 10th of November where commuters get to experience a taste of the Philippines using 360 VR goggles, and getting on a paddleboard and skycycle. Every month, we run a holiday competition for two to the Philippines which we feature at these events.

The most important event certainly is the World Travel Mart where we have our biggest ever participation composed of UK market specialist tour operators, hotels/resorts, and airlines.

We also tap our strong overseas Filipino communities in UK in coordination with the Philippine Embassy in London. Our more than 200,000 Filipino residents here in UK are our tourism front liners in promoting cost efficiently our country through the social media and word-of-moth referrals to their British friends, colleagues, employers and extended families.

In all these activities, we work closely with the British travel trade partners on tactical cooperation to ensure that we have the best value and wide array of flight and tour products to offer to the consumers, and with media supporters to help promote the myriad tourism facets and compelling reasons to visit the Philippines.

What role does the UK travel trade play in generating business and what training and incentives do you offer to your industry partners?

Throughout the year, we have been working much closer with our valued partners in the UK travel industry to position the Philippines as a top-of-mind destination for both leisure and business amidst the challenges faced by the industry. Together with our key tourism partners, we have been embarking on many wide and exciting activities and campaigns to actively encourage travellers to visit to our world-renowned shores. We involve them continually in all of our projects from consumer shows, station domination series and our recent PH Tourism Weekend.

We have a very active Philippine Tourism Office in London which handles the UK market including the Northern and Southern Europe Market clusters.  Our team  here travels regularly across the United Kingdom to conduct destination training for our travel agent partners. Recently our London team did training for our STA offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh. After WTM, we will be conducting a selling mission to reach out to the travel trade in Bristol and Cardiff.

We are very active also in all the travel trade (B2B) activities organised by the PATA UK Chapter, Travel Bulletin and Travel Weekly covering key cities such as London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Cardiff, Norwich and New Castle.

In fact, at WTM, we will also be staging a media address to highlight the achievements and campaigns of our largest travel trade partners in the UK including Philippine Airlines, STA Travel, Expedia and Singapore Airlines on the 8th of November.