Promoting Tourism

THE Philippines is lucky to be a tropical country. No snow and not much heat generated during summer.

As a tropical country, we are luckier to have more tourist spots where foreigners spend bucks to visit and enjoy the country. No doubt, we have lots of inbound tourists that make tourism a profitable venture for the government in terms of revenues.

Aside from our local products that add up to our gross domestic product exported worldwide, we have a number of beautiful places that entice foreign tourists. If we have lots of them in our land, it is inevitable that they spend their money here.

On the part of the government, we have lots of taxes imposed on foreign visitors starting from airports, seaports and other places of ingress and egress. They need transportation to wander the tourist attractions, where our drivers and travel agencies earn.

As when they arrived at their destinations, they spend money for their accommodations and food, giving resorts and other places of interests a lot of profit.

When there are lots of visiting tourists, there are lots of souvenir shops set up by enterprising Filipinos. Our creativity and skill make our souvenir items the best buys especially for foreigners. There are a lot of cottage industries that mass-produce items such as key chains, domestic ornaments, apparels and other stuffs that foreigners figuratively buy.

Food products are a fad too when visiting places. It seems to be mandatory for tourists to have a taste of anything that locals call their native products. Food is consumable, they generate production when they are consumed, thus another source of income for producers.

Promoting tourism is promoting livelihood opportunities for locals. There are lots of things that are within the commerce of man, as they say in my college economics class. Promoting tourism is definitely income generating for enterprises and for the government too through revenues.

I found myself inside a fast food outlet of a famous burger chain last weekend in Angeles City. I was delighted to see in their uniforms our tourism battle cry “It’s more fun…’”. In their own little way, they are helping promote tourism anchored on the fact that Angeles City is a favorite destination for foreigners.

Just a little idea… why not paint taxi cabs with tourism-related ads to attract and impress more visitors? A country endowed with a booming tourist industry is lucky if only it is developed and promoted well.

Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, among others, are rapidly developing and promoting their tourism industry. Successful at that, they attract thousands of tourists from all over the world to see what’s in store for them.

Since Hong Kong has a Disneyland, Singapore invited Universal Studios to invest and put up a theme park there. It is now one of the most visited places in that little territory which was once a British colony.

Promoting tourism reminds me of the letter-invitation of Congressman Carmelo “Tarzan” Lazatin to Disneyland to put up a theme park too at Clark.

Why not? I wonder what the latest is on that.

There are lots of ways and means to promote tourism to both local and foreign tourists. There are a lot of gimmicks for the furtherance of our tourism industry. We have lots of creative and artistic minds that can conceptualize things for our tourism industry.