Tourism receipts, or expenditures by international inbound visitors, including payments to national carriers for international transport, have reached P694 billion, based on Bureau of Immigration-recorded arrivals, Tourism Secretary Christina Garcia Frasco said on Tuesday.
“According to the BI, the total number of foreign arrivals into the country was at 5.940 million in 2025, and if you add to the overseas Filipinos, which are at 543,000 plus, that total is 6.48 million arrivals in 2025,” Frasco said during lunch with the media.
The BI numbers were higher than the 5,865,319 foreign visitor arrivals in 2025, according to data captured in the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) eTravel System.
Frasco said there was a discrepancy in the BI numbers against the DICT eTravel system.
“We saw this already last year. So, we formed a technical working group composed of the DoT, the BI, and the DICT to examine the discrepancy. What we have found is that, first, some arrivals were not registered in eTravel due to exemptions from the requirement to complete eTravel. Exempted are the diplomats, as well as employees of foreign governments,” she said.
Other persons exempt from filling out the Philippine eTravel are members of International Organizations and delegates to certain official events.
“What we found also with our meeting with the BI is that there are sure cruise passengers and chartered flight passengers who were not inputted in the eTravel.
According to eTravel records, there were only 30,000 cruise passengers in 2025, but according to BI records, there are over 50,000. So there is a discrepancy, and it is also present in previous years. So, we traced back as far as 2023,” she said.
Complete reports
Further, Frasco said the discrepancy in 2025 was 618,000; in 2024, 486,000; and in 2023, 212,000 arrivals.
“We want to make sure that our reporting is complete and accurate in terms of foreign arrivals in the country, which is why we are aligning the data from the BI and the DICT’s eTravel. Because if we only use the eTravel, some foreign arrivals are not logged because of the exemptions,” she said.