Numbers often show serious shortcomings. And, in the case of the country losing out badly in the Southeast Asia tourism race, it’s primarily about our habit of paying mere lip service to well-thought out strategic plans on how and where the country can make money.

To get you up to speed regarding that conclusion, last week a resurrected survey showed the country drew fewer than four million international visitors from January to August last year.

Coincidentally, the survey came out amid heavy censure of the current tourism boss, who stands charged with supposedly shamelessly promoting herself instead of our tourist destinations.

Four million spending visitors, of course, isn’t peanuts. It still means we’ve earned billions — which as of last count stood at some US$11.8 billion — from today’s Tourist age, the age where millions travel round the world for a selfie.

But alongside Indonesia’s 10.4 million visitors or Vietnam’s 11.6 million or Thailand’s 21.88 million or Malaysia’s staggering 28.24 million, our four-million fifth-place finish is pathetically paltry and embarrassing. We’ve missed out on tourists.

Moreover, it’s a doubly wretched embarrassment because of the fact that our country’s strategic planners knew beforehand how bad things would be that they even put down on paper plans on how to surmount it.

These plans or strategic directions are contained in the National Tourism Development Plan (NTDP) 2023-2028, which essentially says the country is worth journeying to as it offers enough world-class natural attractions, a rich cultural heritage and diverse offerings to qualify as an Asian premier tourist destination.

Policy-wise, the NTDP is the much needed followup to the outdated Tourism Act of 2009 (RA 9593) which mandates tourism-related things like tourism investment and employment goals and the development of cultural, religious, heritage and eco tourism.

But despite newer and better clear-headed goals, here we are still confusedly grappling with mind-boggling issues like improving tourism-related infrastructure, seamless digital-based connectivity to tourist spots, wayward tourism branding, dislocation of locals and overtourism of a few attractions. All of which our smart neighbors solved early, allowing them to effectively exploit their countries’ potential to attract and make money from high-spending tourist markets.

At any rate, the country’s myriad tourism problems are far too complex for a short column as this.

But should you need graphic details, an interesting paper was recently put out by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) titled, “Philippine Tourism Sectoral Review (2000 to 2025): From Promise to Power–Accelerating the Philippines’ Tourism Transformation toward Sustainability, Competitiveness and Inclusion.”

Anyway, joining the trendy bashing of our flood control-addicted Congress, knowing what our corruption-prone lawmakers are up to regarding tourism is of interest.

Without batting an eye, the PIDS declares that its “data suggest that Philippine tourism legislation has grown in quantity but not in quality.”

While lawmakers actively filed tourism bills ever since RA 9593’s enactment, these bills rarely translated to a “comprehensive modernization agenda, one that integrates digital transformation, climate resilience, human capital development and local governance alignment into tourism law.”

In fact, the PIDS says their data show “a vast majority of these bills are site-specific or declaratory, i.e., laws that merely proclaim a waterfall, cave, island, or town as a ‘tourism zone,’ ‘eco-tourism park,’ ‘heritage village’” and nothing much else.

“Their chief utility,” PIDS says, “lies in political symbolism, i.e., such designations allow local politicians to advertise legislative accomplishment and stimulate short-term publicity rather than long-term publicity rather than long-term investment.”

The retarded Congress, in short, is “a factory of place-branding acts, not a source of transformative tourism reform.”