‘Twinning’ eyed to boost tourist arrivals

The Department of Tourism (DOT) is considering “twinning” of matching Philippine tourist spots with those of other countries in the Asia Pacific, to cash in on the region’s “rising to popularity as a preferred destination among travelers from the United States.”

“There is no better time than now to leverage on the dawning of the Asian century,” Tourism Secretary Wanda Corazon Teo said during the Philippine business mission in San Jose, California.

Teo was speaking to 40 Asian-American travel agents and media representing Vietnam, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan.

“As early as 2014, the other side of the world like the US has begun discovering and rediscovering the Philippines placing us on the top four preferred destinations along with China, India, and Japan,” Teo said.

Purificacion Molintas, DOT attaché in San Francisco, added: “We will take advantage of the Americans’ interest in the Philippines, we should strike while the iron is hot and craft all the strategies that can capture the market to the Philippines.”

The US is the second biggest foreign visitor market of the Philippines with 14.87 percent of the total market share.

There were 428,767 arrivals from the US in the first five months of 2017. It has risen by 12.78 percent as compared to the 377,595 US arrivals in the same period last year.

Teo said Americans visiting the Philippines usually connect through Hong Kong; while some fly next to Singapore. Citing a 2016 DOT survey, she said US travelers also prefer Bangkok and to Kuala Lumpur as connecting flights to the Philippines.

She said 15.80 percent of US travelers consider other traditional domestic destinations such as Cebu other than Manila. Palawan was preferred by 9.30 percent, and Pampanga — which has strong affinity with Clark, Subic, and La Union, especially among Amer-Asian descents of former US servicemen by 6.60 percent.

Teo said 6.50 percent of US travelers still consider Boracay as their favorite destination.

Asia Pacific is considered an “exotic area” and everybody is looking at the region as the new destination, particularly Americans who have been to Europe, South America, she said.

“While destination twinning has already been an established program of the DOT in the recent years, we have been working to expand the reach of this strategy to new emerging markets like Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, among others. I have personally instructed our overseas offices to beef up their respective networks and hone them along the way. And in the case of San Francisco, this is the very first time they are touching base with Thai and Vietnamese travel markets, only this year. Our target for them is to increase these markets by 10 percent in the next two years,” Teo said.

Molintas said the DOT in San Francisco has started implementing the “twin-destination” promotions in collaboration with DOT Los Angeles, targeting Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia; citing California, along with Vancouver, among hosts of the most diverse Asian diasporas in North America, making them perfect markets for the program.

Teo said one of the immediate plans of the tourism department is to strengthen its partnership with the travel trade in the West Coast, which already committed to produce tourists all over the US to twin destinations of Manila and Bangkok in October this year in time for the memorial service of the king of Thailand.

DOT San Francisco is also pairing off Manila with Vietnam, with PAL offering special rates for Manila-Saigon, US-MLA-Saigon.