Tag Archives: tourism

komentaryo

Damage control, the Tulfos, and returning the P60M pesos

Will it matter at all that the Tulfos are returning the P60 million pesos that it received from the Department of Tourism’s (DOT’s) advertising fund placed with PTV4?

The answer is no. Because while that’s P60M in taxpayers’ money that changed hands from DOT to PTV4 to the Tulfos’ production outfit Bitag Media, and of course we want it returned, there is little here that tells us it won’t happen again. Neither is there any indication that more of it isn’t happening. See, there are just too many other questions about this triumvirate of two government agencies and one private company, bound together by the Tulfo name. There are too many questions that demand answers.  (more…)

komentaryo

A portrait of a Tourism Secretary as failure

For almost a year now we have listened to a Department of Tourism (DOT) with a Secretary Wanda Tulfo Teo, that has no vision, no gameplan, no clear sense of what tourism is even supposed to be about, given the state of the nation.

You listen to Teo speaking with Pinky Webb on CNN Philippines and you realize she still knows absolutely nothing a year into her job. All she has as far as a tourism plan is concerned is an excitement about the investments that are coming in from China, and the interest in having international beauty pageants in the Philippines again and again.

Neither of those two things is what a sustainable, pro-people, environmental tourism plan makes. But what would someone with no credentials know?

The only two qualifications of Mrs. Teo to become DOT Secretary: (1) she owned a travel agency for Mt. Apo hikers which meant inevitably contributing to the degradation of this protected area, and (2) she’s a Tulfo. (more…)

komentaryo

Wanda, Yedda, Miss Universe: Pomp, pageantry, pretense

Tourism Secretary Wanda Tulfo Teo is evading a whole lot of questions when she says that government will not spend a single cent on hosting the Miss Universe pageant in the country.

The mere fact that the Department of Tourism (DOT) is all agog about finding sponsors, about doing press releases on this pageant, is already the Duterte government spending on the Miss Universe. This is a government office that should be putting together a real tourism plan, one that takes into consideration the crisis that tourism is faced with, interwoven as it is with environmental degradation, heritage destruction, and infrastructure underdevelopment.

For a pageant like Miss Universe, the DOT will be spending the rest of the next six months just working on this one thing, using whatever’s left of its P3.61 BILLION-peso budget for 2016. And you know this to be true because what else have we heard from the DOT since Secretary Teo was appointed?

Nothing.

(more…)

komentaryo

Tourism and the poor Filipino face

In January, the Department of Tourism (DOT) celebrated the 6.09% rise in the number of tourists to the Philippines. That’s 25,000 more people who have come to visit this country where everything’s more fun. That’s 436,079 tourists who landed in good ol’ Pinas in January alone.

It gives me goosebumps. Far from the good kind.

Because it would take an amount of delusion to think this all good, and only the naïve would think those numbers equal to development or change. This is not to dispute those numbers, neither is it to question those online surveys that say Boracay is the Best Beach in Asia. This is to ask questions borne of actually traveling this country, and observing tourism on the ground.

This is to ask: have you heard of the “poor Filipino face?” (more…)

komentaryo

the dangers of fun

congratulations are in order: the DOT after all has triggered a meme of itsmorefuninthephilippines and its campaign has functioned exactly the way they imagined (with the help of a media enterprise now admitting its bias, yehey!) it is not without its critics, myself included, but i don’t mind letting it have a life all its own, commentary included about as much as unthinking celebration: if we can trip on the DPWHere, how can we not trip on this one?

which is not to agree that we should be blinded by all this fun. which is to hope that we all know — we all agree — that tourism in itself, as an industry is a sharp and double-edged sword. one only needs to look at Boracay and Tagaytay and find that foreign investment has meant congestion and pollution and the slow but sure killing off of local industry.

Poor entrepreneurs have generated their own capital over time, by starting small and reinvesting profits over several years. However, they may be squeezed out if outside investors drive rapid growth in the industry – as occurred at Boracay Island in the Philippines (Shah, 2000).

one only needs to walk through Makati Avenue on any evening, or Greenbelt 3 on a weekend to find that here are forms of tourism like we don’t want to talk about. go off to Angeles and find the industry of girlie bars that have been brought back to life by the middle-aged Caucasian man who has decided to disappear quietly in the Philippines upon retiring from wherever in the world he comes.

“The Department of Tourism is treading on dangerous waters. Marketing the Philippines as a destination for divorcees is practically synonymous to marketing the Philippines as a destination for sex tourists” (gabriela website, 2011)

The Philippines is one of the favored destinations of paedophile sex tourists from Europe and the United States. (“Global law to punish sex tourists sought by Britain and EU,” The Indian Express, 21 November 1997)

The tourism program of the government which aims to project the Philippines as a major tourist destination has increased the number of prostituted women. As more and more areas of the country are targeted for tourism, more and more women are driven to prostitution in desperation to ensure their family’s survival. (“Women Evaluate the State of the Nation,” GABRIELA, 24 July 1997)

these statements might be decades old, yes. that these resonate in the present? it is everything and telling of what any tourism program has to care about. it’s also to point to this fact: the reality has got to get better for the majority in this nation, so that they might know of those fun images, too. the goal has to be about making those witty taglines real for all of us.

because let us not even talk about tourism and this campaign, as if it is something that will save us from anything at all. know that this campaign in particular is replete with the limitations brought on by social class: more than who would even say “it’s more fun…” here, who exactly can afford to think about fun in this way? who has the wherewithal to be putting together memes, to have photographs of nation that are deemed worthy for being tagged “fun”?

know too that in the narratives of tourism across the world, it is the poor that suffers for it. they are the ones who lose access to their own resources, because they are not equipped to negotiate with the programs of tourism that exist.

there are many other examples where a few private entrepreneurs exclude local people in order to gain key assets, often through unauthorised land-grabbing. For example, Sabang is the gateway town for St Paul’s National Park in the Philippines, and 20–30 years ago contained much public land, almost all of which has now been privately exploited. The local authority lacks effective power to prevent breaches of planning regulations (Ashley, Boyd, Goodwin 2000).

know that “Tourism development has not <…> incorporated poverty elimination objectives. It remains driven by economic, environmental and/or cultural perspectives at national and international levels” (Ashely etal., 2000).

and in the philippines it is driven now by the notion of fun: which is always and only fleeting. which is only true for a few of us.

sources:
PRO-POOR TOURISM: PUTTING POVERTY AT THE HEART OF THE TOURISM AGENDA by Caroline Ashley, Charlotte Boyd and Harold Goodwin, Natural Resource Perspectives (journal), March 2000.
factbook on sexual global exploitation: philippines. http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/philippi.htm.
“Tourism Dept draws flak for divorcee tourism.” gabriela website. http://gabrielawomensparty.net/news/press-releases/tourism-department-draws-flak-divorcee-marketing.
“Tourism, the poor and other stakeholders: Asian experience” by Shah, K. (2000). ODI Fair-Trade in Tourism Paper. London: ODI.