The Department of Tourism has reported that as of 19 December, the country has already received 2.46 million foreigners with tourism receipts exceeding P150 billion toward the yearend.

In a press conference on Monday, Tourism Secretary Maria Christina Frasco said the country is not impossible to record 2.5 million foreign tourist arrivals by the end of the year as it already exceeded the 1.7 million target.

Topping the countries with the most arrivals are the United States (461,967 tourists), South Korea (387,780), Australia (122,971), Canada (112,015), United Kingdom (93,440), Japan (91,557), Singapore (50,964), India (49.330), Malaysia (44,357) and Vietnam (37,028).

The foreign tourist arrivals, however, are still far from the 2019 pre-pandemic record of 8.2 million.

On the other hand, she said revenue earned from these arrivals is P149 billion as of 20 November.

Meanwhile, Frasco said they are setting the tourism receipts target for 2023 at $5.854 billion.

"This number may be a moving target in the sense that as we continue to improve the enabling mechanisms for tourism in the Philippines. We are confident that while we lay this down as a benchmark, we will try as best we can to have an even more optimistic number of arrivals in the year to come. We are putting that down as a baseline," Frasco pointed out.

Tourist assistance call center

Next year, Frasco said the DoT will launch its tourist assistance call center, arming the DoT and other concerned government agencies to run after or sanction those erring citizens that victimize tourists, particularly stakeholders in the transportation sector and those vendors from imposing high food prices to tourists.

In previous years, many tourists have been victimized by erring taxi drivers who charged exorbitant sums, smearing the country's reputation.

"It means that, if tourists may find themselves in a negative situation, especially if it's a negative situation, including encountering scams and the like, we will now have a number that tourists can call wherever they may be in the Philippines that will be directed to our regional offices. The call center will also connect to tourists for proper government offices that they can ask assistance from if they encounter scams of that nature," Frasco said.