DOT to push priority tourism products

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Tourism (DOT) is eyeing to boost its marketing initiatives for ten tourism products, an official of the agency said.

“For next year (2020), we will be doing aggressive marketing,” Tourism Assistant Secretary Roberto Alabado III said at a press conference.

“We have have ten tourism products so each one will have a video and campaign,” he added.

Among the ten tourism products under the National Tourism Development Plan (NTDP) 2016-2022 are nature-based tourism; cruise and nautical tourism; leisure and entertainment tourism; education tourism; sun and beach tourism; health, wellness and retirement tourism; diving and marine sports tourism; meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions (MICE) tourism and farm tourism.

Apart from the marketing of the tourism products, Alabado said a focus on the regions will also be implemented next year.

“We have our regions and each one will have their own regional video and collaterals,” Alabado said.

Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo-Puyat earlier said the DOT will also be focusing on the crafting of tourism development plans of airport destinations next year.

“We’re going to be approving the tourism development plans of all the tourist destinations of the 12 international airports,” Puyat said.

Puyat said she discovered that not all the destinations of the country’s international airports have tourism development plans.

“So we will be focusing on that especially next year. We need a tourism development plan so that we can actually plan our local infrastructure,” Puyat said, adding that this will be handled by the Tourism Infrastructure and Enterprise Zone Authority (TIEZA).

The tourism secretary also earlier disclosed plans of the DOT to boost its revenue-generating initiatives next year.

Among these efforts are the launch of the Philippine Fun Sale, where malls will hold sales for one month.

Based on data from the DOT in 2017, shopping was the number one activity done by tourists visiting the country, with 51.60 percent of tourists taking part in it.

Shopping is also where tourists spend a large amount of expenditure on, as it amounts to $20.90 of the Average Daily Expenditure Per Capita in 2017 of $125.65.

The DOT earlier emphasized that building up shopping tourism in the country is part of the equation to spur economic growth, create millions of jobs, livelihoods and enterprises and help the Philippines become a globally recognized quality destination.

Apart from the Philippines Fun Sale project, Puyat also identified the opening of airports, hosting of more MICE events and targeting alternative markets as other factors that will boost the tourism sector’s revenues next year.

“And of course not only promote sun and beach, we just met with our tourism attachés and our market representatives and we agreed to not only focus on our major markets, but also alternative markets like South America – they actually don’t know that we exist.

“So we are going to be strengthening alternative markets so that we don’t only rely on our primary market,” Puyat said.