On April 18, 180 Chinese visitors arrived in Boracay Island on a chartered flight operated by OK Airlines from Changsha, China to Kalibo, Aklan. This was the first trip from China since the market for foreign travel reopened on January 8.
Island of Boracay – The Department of tourist (DOT) is upbeat about the country’s tourist industry’s continued revival, especially with the arrival of group travel and chartered aircraft from several of its major source markets, notably China.
On April 18, 180 Chinese visitors arrived in Boracay Island on a chartered flight operated by OK Airlines from Changsha, China to Kalibo, Aklan. This was the first trip from China since the market for foreign travel reopened on January 8.
The DOT organised a welcome reception for the guests as soon as they disembarked in Kalibo to offer them a taste of the friendly Filipino hospitality.
We are overjoyed to see chartered flights from China returning to Kalibo. This just serves to demonstrate the continued popularity of Boracay as a travel destination for Chinese visitors. “We will vigorously pursue the promotion of sustainable and responsible tourism in Boracay along with the local government and our very active private stakeholders so that more people will eventually visit and take in its beauty,” said Tourism Secretary Christina Garcia Frasco.
Approximately 434,175 Chinese tourists visited Boracay in 2019, making them the most common foreign visitors there. This was before the COVID-19 outbreak caused a worldwide travel halt. By the end of 2019, the Philippines had also welcomed over 1.7 million tourists from China.
Secretary Frasco emphasised the significance of visa reforms that will ease entry for the country’s top source markets such as China during the high-level convergence meeting between the DOT, Department of Foreign Affairs, Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), Department of Justice (DOJ), and Bureau of Immigration (BI) that took place on March 24.
Since April 11, all Philippine Foreign Service Posts (PFSPS) in the People’s Republic of China have begun processing and issuing Philippine visas to Chinese tour groups as a consequence of the agencies’ convergence.
“The DOT hopes to match or perhaps exceed the number of Chinese tourists we had prior to the outbreak. We thank our partner organisations, in particular the Department of Foreign Affairs, for responding to our request to resume processing and issuing Philippine visas to Chinese tour groups, soon after we made it clear that we needed China to once again serve as our main source of inbound tourists, Secretary Frasco said.
The DOT Chief said, “We anticipate other interventions such as the adoption of an electronic visa system to facilitate the ease of entry into the nation of our tourists.”
The Ministry of Culture and tourist (MOCT) in China, which, as you may know, included the Philippines as one of the 20 countries to be part of its trial zones for outbound tourist group trips, has been a source of significant cooperation for the DOT, as Secretary Frasco previously stated.
To aid in the promotion and marketing of Philippine tourism to the Chinese market, the Department now has two satellite offices in mainland China, one in Beijing and the other in Shanghai.
Source: traveldailynews