The Bureau of Immigration expects a total of 1.5 million arrivals in the last month of the year, Commissioner Norman Tansingco said yesterday.

The travel patterns, he pointed out, indicate a significant rise in travelers in 2023. Less than 100,000 arrivals a month during the pandemic's peak were a far cry, he said, from the almost 1 million arrivals the BI began recording by the second quarter of this year.

Tansingco disclosed that nearly half of the 1,160,699 passengers who arrived in November were foreign citizens, according to the BI's records. This reflects that the aggressive tourism campaigns of the government are working.

Before the pandemic, the BI recorded 1.7 million arrivals during December. The total number of arriving passengers for the entire year is already 79 percent higher than in 2022.

Meanwhile, Tansingco shared that Filipino outbound tourism has also bounced back. In November, the agency saw almost 1.1 million departures, a figure already very close to the 1.3 million recorded in November 2019.

The BI chief added that to ensure seamless operations during  the Christmas season, they have increased their workforce and sent out augmentation teams and mobile counters.