The good news coming out from the 6th World Travel Expo 2022 ending today at Okada, Manila is that the number of foreign visitors to the country has already reached 1,767,791 as of Monday, 17 October, according to data from the Department of Tourism.
The figure is something to rave about since the DoT target of having 1.7 million non-Filipino visitors coming off Covid-19 restrictions has already been accomplished with plenty to spare.
At the rate inbound travelers are coming, not counting returning overseas Filipino workers and balikbayans celebrating the world's longest Christmas season in the country, the country may well log two million foreign visitors by the end of 2022.
With Daily Tribune as a media partner, WTE 2022 and similar events are necessary to further drum up support for local travel destinations as other countries have also opened up their tourism sectors with the easing of Covid-19 restrictions.
Just the other day, the Department of Health announced the dropping of the One Health Pass requirement that has caused many inbound travelers to the Philippines, OFWs and non-OFWs alike, much distress.
In its place would be the e-Arrival card which, according to the DoH, would require less information from travelers who have found filling up the many required information fields of the One Health Pass too tedious.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. himself signaled a paradigm shift in treating Covid-19 vis-a-vis opening up the economy, including the tourism sector, by saying the virus that first reared its head in Wuhan, China in late 2019 would no longer be considered a health "emergency".
Notwithstanding the emergence of variants and sub-variants of Covid-19 and its Omicron mutation, like the more transmissible XBB and XBC strains, scientific reports provide some level of assurance that they may not necessarily result in severe illnesses requiring hospitalization.
Also on Friday, the DoH said while it has detected the local transmission of XBB, everything that has worked to ease the spread of previous Covid variants can still protect people from new mutations.
As things presently stand, the low overall healthcare utilization rate in the Philippines, with 26.8 percent of Covid beds utilized and 25 percent of intensive care unit beds in use, can only encourage more economic activities and entice foreigners to come to the Philippines.
As the DoT has been trumpeting, the country has put Covid challenges under control. "We, at the DoT, fervently believe that this is yet another challenge that can be eventually overcome by our nation," DoT regional director Sharlene Zabala-Batin said as she encouraged local tourists to rediscover the 7,640 islands of the Philippines.
She said the optimism is partly because tourism frontliners are fully vaccinated, while 90 percent have acquired first and second booster shots. "We have gone through our fair share of ups and down this year, but the department has exerted efforts to improve travel conditions to encourage more tourists to explore our country."
For Tourism Secretary Christina Frasco, the next goal is "to get it (arrivals) to the two million mark" by doing everything to further open up the country to international travel.
"We feel the great interest in the Philippines and we can see that the recovery of our tourism sector has already started," Frasco said, adding the DoT's Philippine Travel Exchange Program has already earned P172 million in record-breaking sales.
