Advice for our new Secretary of Tourism

Dear Madame Secretary, Once you have gotten your bearings in your new job, can we please pull those embarrassing “Anak means child” TV ads running on BBC and CNN all around the world?

This ad reflects a colonial mentality (the protagonist is a handsome young blonde Caucasian whom all the Filipinos are fawning over); it sells the wrong location, set in a place where only very few, low-spending, backpackers will go (Surigao River); it is being broadcast indiscriminately at considerable cost in viewing areas which are not reasonable markets for us (I saw it just now in Bergen, Norway – we’re pitching natural beauty to Norwegians?); and the selling proposition is, not to mince words, stupid (if you lack a mother figure, have no family, and plan to travel alone, come here and a street vendor you don’t know will call you “son” – what kind of demographic are we hoping for, exactly?) Before we had Anak, there was the ad which was apparently aimed at blind people who watch TV.

Giving huge advertising budgets to pretentious, ignorant government officials is just throwing money away. I have sat through 22 years of DOT advertising schemes, and not a single one made business or marketing sense. (It’s More Fun is not as bad as others, but many of its images are demeaning to Filipinos, or depict the same scenery as every other tropical country in the world, or show scenes substantially devoid of tourists, thus subliminally communicating that “you should come where hardly any other tourists do.” Try promoting a restaurant or a hotel with that message.)

I’ll go further and suggest that advertising is not what our tourism industry needs at all. Most Filipinos believe that a clever promo can fix anything. That’s just not true. Our hotels, restaurants, tour guides, airlines, relevant national authorities, and localities with tourism potential need first to make sure we have a good product to sell. This means: • Competently-designed, well-maintained hotels with correctly-trained staff.

• comfortable, hygienic restaurants that serve tasty food (not just cheap food, not just Michelin wannabes);

• tourist guides who can speak their customers’ language without making them cringe, who know their attractions and routes, and are not just bent on getting a kickback from rip-off souvenir shops, restaurants, and massage parlors;

• airlines that run on time and airports that are orderly, clean, and comfortable (enough seating, good AC, no nonstop announcements by desperate-sounding airline staff with shrill, nagging voices);

• Customs and Immigration officials who are actually at their posts for arrivals/departures, and who welcome instead of harass visitors;

• and, local governments which are at least somewhat tourism friendly: clean, traffic-free, safe, tough on tourist traps and dishonest taxi drivers and merchants, with clear and helpful signage in multiple languages.

In brief, each tourism player needs to be responsible for itself, instead of constantly looking to the national government to save the day with advertising. The best help the national government can give is to not be a hindrance.

At Plantation Bay we do our own international promotion, without waiting for the DOT. We focus on travel industry movers in viable target markets rather than the general public, and accordingly spend very little on advertising.

But before we do promotion, first we make sure we have a superior product, investing heavily in physical facilities as well as in our people, sending up to ten officers a year for study courses in such places as Cornell, Harvard, MIT, and the Culinary Institute of America, as well as on company-paid tourism travel to such places as Las Vegas, Paris, even Machu Picchu (so they know what it is like to be the customer, the better to anticipate our guest needs and preferences).

So, in a nutshell, may I make this suggestion to you, and to everyone in Philippine tourism: Superior Product and Superior People first, Clever Promo second.

Tourism is the world’s largest industry and the largest employer in many countries. It creates more jobs for a given amount of investment than almost any other business. If the DOT could orchestrate all of the above, then it would be truly valuable to our country.

Writing from Bergen airport, on my way to Amsterdam for a few days before Barcelona.