LOCAL travel and tour operators are hoping tourists from Asian and European countries will fill the slack left by American travelers affected by the US financial woes.

National Association of Independent Travel Agencies chairman emeritus Robert Lim Joseph said travel operators are starting to feel the effect of the problems in Wall Street with the decreasing number of returning US-based Filipinos who come home to travel.

“We are now depending on the Asean, our Asian neighbors and the European Union, and hoping they would handle this problem well,” Joseph said.

Joseph lauds the strategy of Tourism Secretary Joseph Ace Durano of targeting key Asian markets for the country’s marketing efforts, saying the Asian tourists are keeping the Philippine tourism brisk despite these trying times.

The private sector, together with the government, is also encouraging Filipinos to travel in the Philippines to keep the industry, which has been providing a lot of jobs and economic opportunities in the provinces alive.

“We have never depended on the volume, that is why we need to be creative in our marketing efforts,” he said.

“We need to be aggressive with our marketing strategy because there is sure to be a snowballing effect of what is going on in New York,” he added.

Travel tour operators are pushing for at least the doubling of the P700- million budget of the Department of Tourism for marketing abroad.

Joseph said the budget, which is a measly 10 percent of Malaysia’s marketing budget, is not enough to push the Philippines’ marketing efforts in key cities abroad.

American tourists entering the Philippines make up the second biggest of all nationalities in 2007, making up close to 600,000 of the recorded 3.09 million arrivals that year.

South Koreans (653,310) and the Japanese (395,012) take up the first and third places, respectively.

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Deactivating Quedancor feared to make agricultural credit risky

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Group calls for review of trade-lib policy to check entry of contaminated food

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Global credit crunch may force Hedcor to shelve power project

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Operators pin hope on Asian, European tourists

LOCAL travel and tour operators are hoping tourists from Asian and European countries will fill the slack left by American travelers affected by the US financial woes.

Palace releases P31M for Mindanao river basin project

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