Inviting visitors

At the rate we are going, we ought to shut down the Department of Tourism or fold it up under the Department of Trade and Industry. There is no more reason for their being. Only UN officials and New York Times staffers investigating human rights abuses will risk visiting us.

The travel advisories about the ISIS affiliate terror group Abu Sayyaf hunting potential kidnap-for-ransom victims in the Visayas must have scared a good number of potential visitors. Then there is the latest travel advisory about Palawan for the same reason.

We have three of the world’s top island destinations, Palawan (number 1), Boracay (number 2) and Cebu (number 6). Two are explicitly covered by the travel warnings and the blanket warning on Central Visayas probably includes Boracay.

One travel agency complained in a report aired on television news that they lost P30 million overnight with cancellations of in-bound tour groups after the first advisory was made. The fact that they did find the Abu Sayyaf bandits in Bohol confirms the accuracy of the US government warnings.

It matters little now that the bandits were eventually all killed. The Abus have shown they are able to go far from Basilan and Sulu and no place is safe. We are reminded of how they abducted tourists from Las Palmas, a luxury Palawan resort some years ago.

 The ISIS inspired banditry down South had been a long festering problem that’s difficult to put a lid on. It is obvious the bandits have support within their communities. Kidnap for ransom had become an industry that sustains people in those areas making it difficult to flush out and eliminate the bandits.

It is such a pity that we cannot capitalize on the beautiful islands, acclaimed the world over, that nature has gifted us. With top honors being given Palawan, Boracay and Cebu by a prestigious tourist and leisure publication, we should be crawling with tourists by now. Word of mouth with the help of the internet can do wonders in getting visitors to our shores with the minimum expense charged to the taxpayers. It works the other way too.

But other than the banditry problem, we have many other unresolved issues that are well within the ability of our government to address. For example, a friend of mine, Rosan Cruz, returned last week from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. She told me that it took her one hour and forty five minutes to clear Philippine immigration at NAIA 3.

I was surprised that problem is still popping up. I thought the concerned Duterte Cabinet members have been able to fix it. Rosan told me that the lines were longest for returning Filipinos.

I thought that would be an easy problem to fix by automating immigration clearance for returning citizens. They are doing that now in some airports in the United States… and I am told, in Cambodia too as of seven years ago.

When we visited the US last Christmas, my wife, who holds a US passport, was processed speedily by a computer. You just put your passport in a slot where a photo of the main page is taken and the data processed. On the other hand, I had to fall in line and wait for half an hour or so to have a human immigration agent process my entry.

The beauty of letting computers handle immigration processing is that the machines do not require overtime pay. Neither do these computers do a slowdown as the human immigration agents are now doing at our airports.

Given our problems with the immigration bureaucracy, we should minimize our immigration processes. It is being done elsewhere in the world and so it is possible.

When you leave the US, no immigration agents are needed to process passports of citizens and non-citizens alike. I imagine they work on the basis of the airline flight manifest to check who are leaving the country.

Last Friday, there were long immigration lines again and very few immigration booths manned. This mass leaves and work slowdown is unforgivable.  It also makes the government look weak by not doing anything about it for the longest time.

One other thing we should do is to show the world that our top destinations are well provided with facilities and services. In Boracay where millions of visitors come every year, we should have a credible emergency medical facility available.

They must be capable of rescuing a heart attack or stroke victim and stabilizing the patient for quick air transport to a good tertiary hospital in Cebu.

They apparently already have a watercraft serving as an ambulance. But as journalist Stella Arnaldo posted on Facebook last week, she saw the ambulance in a great big hurry with sirens blaring. She found out that it was merely ferrying the Mayor.

Maybe we ought to use what looks like a looming hiatus in visitor arrivals to fix our shortcomings in the more popular tourist destinations. We have taxi drivers to be educated…beaches to be cleaned… communities to be made partners in a national effort to attract visitors to boost the local economies.

Bad news generated by the kidnap-for-ransom bandits in the South travel fast, even if just a threat. We are throwing good money away in trying to attract visitors before we are able to tell the world that we have neutralized the bandits who behead victims unable to pay ransom.

Of course the long term solution is to lick poverty in the areas where the bandits thrive. But in the meantime, the government must show a very strong response even if there will be some amount of collateral damage in the communities supporting the bandits. That shock and awe operation killing 20 Abus should be the way to go.

Otherwise, having the world’s most beautiful islands will mean nothing. That’s a pity because a booming tourism industry will be a good contributor to the local economies.

Reaction

Here is a reader reaction to our column last Friday.

Hi. I am Ysabel Gatmaitan, a piggery farmer.  Anyway, to add to your list of labor markets going abroad, even our veterinarians, animal husbandry graduates, and agriculture graduates farmhands--- end up working abroad in New Zealand cattle farms, Canada, and Australia...

Just saying that it is not just the construction workers and medical nurses and therapists who leave us; even farm workers go abroad. Export quality din kami maghahayop! I’m happy for them who get to work abroad; but tiring for us locals to train and start over.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco.