It’s the plumbing, not the pitch

The Philippines keeps winning tourism awards. At the 2025 World Travel Awards in October, it swept six titles — Asia’s Leading Beach Destination, Leading Dive Destination, Leading Island Destination, and three more. The Department of Tourism was named Asia’s Leading Tourist Board. On paper, that’s a sector on the rise. But the numbers underneath tell a different story, and a recent Philippine Institute for Development Studies review makes it hard to ignore.

In 2024, the country welcomed 5.9 million international visitors. That sounds respectable until you line it up against the neighborhood: Thailand drew 35.5 million, Malaysia 25 million, Vietnam 17.5 million. Even Cambodia pulled in 6.7 million. The Philippines ranked seventh in ASEAN for inbound arrivals and managed only a 72 percent recovery rate from pre-pandemic levels — the weakest among major Southeast Asian destinations. The government’s own target for the year was 7.7 million. It missed by a wide margin.

Yet here’s the number officials like to lead with: the Philippines ranked first in ASEAN for tourism’s overall GDP contribution, generating USD 78 billion in 2023. Impressive, except that figure was driven overwhelmingly by domestic tourism — 134 million domestic trips in 2024, valued at over USD 70 billion. When you strip that away and look at what foreign visitors actually spent, the Philippines placed only fifth in the region at USD 11.3 billion. In other words, we’re celebrating a domestic cushion as though it were international competitiveness. It isn’t. Domestic tourism can absorb shocks, but it doesn’t generate the foreign exchange, higher per-visitor spending, or global market positioning the sector needs to grow.

The PIDS study, presented by Senior Research Fellow Dr. John Paolo Rivera, puts the diagnosis bluntly. “The issue here is not just demand,” he said. “The issue here is systems.” That word — systems — is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and it should. This isn’t a branding problem. The country doesn’t need another tagline. It needs airports that can handle traffic, inter-island transport that doesn’t bankrupt travelers, local governments that coordinate instead of working in silos, and investment pipelines that actually reach destinations beyond the usual three or four.

Dr. Maria Cherry Lyn Rodolfo of the Asian Institute of Management framed it even more sharply: “Connectivity policy is actually tourism policy.” In an archipelago of more than 7,600 islands where nearly all international visitors arrive by air, that’s not a theoretical observation. It’s a concrete political fact. When there are no direct flights to secondary destinations, when runway limitations at airports like Siargao and El Nido force airlines to use smaller planes at higher fares, when a traveler has to route through Manila or Cebu just to reach a place two islands over — the experience breaks. And the World Economic Forum’s 2024 Travel & Tourism Development Index confirms it, ranking the Philippines 69th out of 119 economies, dragged down by a dismal 1.55 out of 7 in tourism services and infrastructure.

The consequences of this broken connectivity aren’t distributed evenly. Tourists pile into Boracay, Cebu, and Bohol because those are the places the system can deliver them to. The result is overtourism and environmental pressure in a handful of hotspots, while high-potential regions sit underdeveloped and undervisited. That’s not a visitor management problem. That’s a state investment problem. Overcrowding in Boracay is the flip side of underinvestment everywhere else.

This matters deeply for places like Western Visayas. Iloilo, for instance, already has real tourism product — the PIDS study itself cites La Paz Batchoy and Pancit Molo as culinary tourism assets, and farm tourism hubs like Damires Hills are creating livelihoods for local farmers. The region hosted 19 new direct international flights in 2025 connecting Cebu, Iloilo, and Kalibo to cities across Asia and beyond. That’s progress. But it’s not enough if the roads linking airport to destination are poor, if internet access is spotty, if local tourism officers rotate with every election cycle and take institutional memory with them.

The PIDS study’s most underappreciated recommendation may be the call for permanent plantilla positions for local tourism officers. Right now, many LGUs treat tourism as a side assignment or a political appointment. Every election resets the clock. No continuity, no accumulated expertise, no long-term destination planning. You cannot build a tourism economy on three-year political cycles. The study also proposes inter-LGU tourism councils, a “tourism circuit development and investment act” with targeted incentives for multi-LGU clusters, and integration of regional tourism circuits into the national Public Investment Program. These are not glamorous proposals. They are governance proposals. And that’s exactly the point.

As DOT Region III Director Dr. Richard Daenos put it: “We would like to focus on something that is not negotiable, and this is to fix infrastructure first.” He’s right. And he’s also right that it cannot all be done at once — reforms need to be sequenced. But the sequencing has to start. Vietnam didn’t overtake the Philippines in arrivals by accident. It invested in connectivity, liberalized visas aggressively, and built Long Thanh International Airport to handle 25 million passengers annually. That’s strategy, not slogans.

The Philippines has the beaches, the culture, the cuisine, the hospitality. Nobody disputes that. What it lacks is the state capacity to turn those assets into a globally competitive tourism sector. Every peso spent marketing a destination that visitors can’t easily reach, can’t affordably connect to, and can’t consistently experience at a high standard is a peso that could have gone toward actually fixing the problem.

Tourism failure, in the end, is a public administration story. The sooner we treat it as one, the sooner the numbers will start to match the potential.