Surge in tourists triggered by ‘travel revenge’

The City Tourism Operations Office underscored that the surge in tourist arrivals in the city last year, especially during the Yuletide season, was because of the so-called ‘travel revenge’ or the eagerness of the people to travel after the easing up of community restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supervising City Tourism Operations Officer Engr. Aloysius Mapalo pointed out that Baguio City, being the country’s undisputed Summer Capital, was among the premier tourist destinations that people wanted to visit which resulted in the significant increase in tourist arrivals even during the lean season.

The city tourism officer admitted that the city had more than 400,000 to 500,000 tourist arrivals only in December which is much higher than the 100,000 to 150,000 recorded visitors during the previous months.

However, he admitted that this record is just a portion of the real number of tourist arrivals because of the proliferation of illegal accommodation establishments and the failure of other similar businesses to declare their actual number of occupants which the city is now trying to address.

According to him, tourist arrivals in the city gradually increased starting March last year after the wave of the Covid-19 Omicron variant started to wane that resulted in the partial easing up of the community quarantine restrictions to allow the movement of people.

Further, Mapalo claimed there was still a surge in tourist arrivals in June, July, August and September which were previously considered as lean tourism months in the city that paved the way for most accommodation establishments to start recovering from the heavy impact inflicted by the pandemic to the local tourism industry.

He revealed that legitimate accommodation establishments have reported record-breaking occupancy during the Yuletide season where the numbers even exceeded pre-pandemic levels that speak well for the ongoing gradual and safe revival of the local economy that is heavily reliant on tourism.

In 2019, the city recorded more than 1.5 million tourist arrivals during the year based on the declared occupancies of permitted hotels, inns and transient houses although this figure is not reportedly accurate because of the absence of a mechanism to monitor the tourist aggravated by the existence of illegal accommodation establishments operating in various barangays citywide.

The city is working out the implementation of a uniform policy among permitted accommodation establishments to mandate tourists to register with the Visitors Information and Travel Assistance (VISITA) tourist application for the city government to establish reliable data of tourist arrivals in the city during a certain period. – Dexter A. See