Tourism turnoff

Leaving Manila for Vienna via Istanbul last week, I cleared immigration at the NAIA Terminal 1 quickly enough.

But our plane sat on the runway for about an hour, waiting in a long line for clearance to take off. Being on takeoff mode, we were all required to remain strapped to our seats.

The fact that such flight delays have become the norm rather than the exception at the congested NAIA is no reason to be complacent about the problem. Technology and improved processes and systems are supposed to make modern life better. We’re bucking the trend at the NAIA.

After regular office hours, the lines are back at the airport immigration counters. Returning through Terminal 1 on Monday night, it took me 20 minutes to clear immigration. The actual processing took only about a minute but the lines were too long.

That was an improvement from the nearly hour-long wait in a snaking line at Terminal 3 when I flew in last month from Tokyo.

With millions unemployed in this country, many of them with college education, how hard is it to hire enough people to man immigration counters at the NAIA, working in three shifts around the clock with no overtime required? All international airports (and even most secondary airports) function 24/7 and should have people receiving regular pay to handle all flights at any hour.

Instead the Ninoy Aquino International Airport is functioning like some backwater airport where immigration personnel can work only from 9 to 5, and beyond that is overtime.

The result is appalling service, inflicted on millions because a few hundred employees want to augment their regular income with overtime pay. Will it take an Einstein to solve this problem?

The Department of Justice should give this problem the urgent attention that it deserves, instead of obsessing over a thousand and one ways to softly kill (as President Duterte put it) Sen. Leila de Lima. The government has already done its worst to De Lima, short of deploying police Superintendent Marvin Marcos to kill her in jail a la Albuera mayor Rolando Espinosa. What more can the DOJ do?

With the glacial pace of Philippine justice, Duterte would be long gone from Malacañang by the time judgment is rendered in the court cases against De Lima. So the DOJ can focus on pressing matters under its jurisdiction, such as the problem at the NAIA immigration.

This problem has been raised by so many others for many months now. The Bureau of Immigration has reportedly hired more people, but the number still isn’t enough.

* * *

It has been pointed out ad infinitum that airports leave the first – and often the only – impression of a country on foreign travelers. If we want to improve tourism, we need better airports.

The Department of Tourism should stop touting domestic travel figures as consuelo de bobo for the country’s lackluster tourism performance compared with much of Southeast Asia.

Domestic travel figures are based on hotel occupancy, which cannot distinguish if the travelers are tourists or merely transitory workers or jobseekers, for example. Considering that we have over 100 million people, 60 million domestic travelers in a year is relatively low. But if we are to gauge tourism performance in terms of domestic figures, the 60 million can of course make us the second top performer in Southeast Asia after Indonesia, which has even more people at over 263 million (about 3.51 percent of the world population) as of this month according to United Nations estimates. In actual foreign tourist arrivals, Indonesia had double our 5.9 million last year, with 11.52 million.

And that 60 million in domestic travelers still won’t beat the fact that the top destination in Southeast Asia for foreign travelers in 2016 was Thailand with an enviable 32.6 million, up nearly 13 percent from the previous year, and earning for the country $45.9 billion.

Malaysia followed with 26.8 million tourists last year – up from 25.7 million in 2015. 

Tiny Singapore followed with a historic high 16.4 million visitors in 2016, with earnings recorded at around $18 billion. Even Vietnam beat us with an enviable 10 million visitors. Cambodia is closing in on us, receiving five million visitors in 2016. We’re ahead of Laos and Myanmar, which saw drastic drops in arrivals last year.

* * *

Connectivity is one of the big tourist considerations. Connectivity refers not only to air travel but also to land transportation. On the excellent highway from Vienna to the Hungarian capital Budapest, a leisurely tourist bus drive last Sunday took only three hours.

Air connectivity is an edge our Southeast Asian neighbors have over us. We lost direct flights to Europe several years ago (now trickling back) due to the common carriers tax imposed on long-haul flights. This tax, unique to the Philippines, was compounded by the government’s requirement for airlines to shoulder the overtime pay of airport immigration and customs personnel – another only in the Philippines imposition.

One reason South Koreans continue to account for the largest number of arrivals in the Philippines is that they have direct flights from Seoul to several top tourist destinations here such as Cebu and Boracay. Bohol has just been added to the list.

This is why we need more regional airports that can accommodate direct international flights. If you take a leave of only a few days from office work, every hour counts. If a foreign visitor has to spend half a day of his work leave languishing at the NAIA and then sitting on the runway for an hour before the connecting flight takes off for Puerto Princesa, for example, he’ll probably just book a direct flight to Bangkok and skip the Philippines.

And this is why delays in arriving and departing from the NAIA, especially for those who need to transit through Manila on their way to our tourist destinations, can be a major turnoff for potential travelers.

With the Duterte administration marking a year in office, perhaps we can finally see some action to improve this sorry situation.