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Friday, January 16, 2004
Kalakbay awardee built Cebu, Bohol tourism trails
By MICHELLE P. SO
Of Sun.Star Cebu
IN Panglao Island in Bohol, businessman Anos Fonacier finds the peace that eluded him 20 years ago. He’s been spending much of his time now in this bucolic province east of Cebu, not building hotels but “giving something back” to the community.
He’s been promoting the protection and preservation of the Philippine tarsier, the world’s smallest primate that is found in Corella town, and the Bohol Marine Triangle, the sealife-rich waters within the islands of Panglao, Pamilacan and Balicasag.
For all his involvement in high-profile causes, he is modest in taking credit for these. He gives the honor to other people.
“I’m just a kibitzer now,” Fonacier says in an interview at the Bohol Beach Club one drizzling Monday night in December. “There are other people involved and the clergy in Bohol is very much active in the conservation of the province’s natural resources.”
Resorts
Maybe that’s just what he is now, a 76-year-old kibitzer. But years back when retiring for the day meant going to bed at 3 a.m., Fonacier blazed the tourism trail in Cebu and Bohol.
He built the Tambuli Beach Club, the first of the commercial beach resorts in Mactan island, in 1979. He transformed a rocky area into a quiet and sun-kissed getaway. Soon after, other resorts were opened.
There are so many private resorts now that there’s hardly a public beach in Mactan.
Two years later, he replicated the Tambuli concept in Argao Beach Club. He developed a seaside cliff on the border of Argao and Dalaguete, towns more than 61 kilometers southeast of Cebu City, into a high-end beach resort. Neglect arising from management problems has led to the deterioration of what was once an exclusive beach resort.
In 1984, he built the Bohol Beach Club, that like the Tambuli Beach Club, introduced Panglao Island to the international tourism world.
Fonacier has made this his retirement home, building a cabana for his own use. The sea, breeze, fresh seafood and tranquility make it an Eden for one who has had enough of the schizophrenic life in a metropolitan environment.
“We built Argao Beach Club and Bohol Beach Club all out of earnings from Tambuli Beach Club. We never looked back,” he says.
He had the uncanny ability to look beyond, to see what would work and what would make it work. He saw the first Mactan bridge as the key to the success of Tambuli.
“We had a head start with Tambuli. People did not realize that that bridge made travel to Mactan convenient. People wanted to get out of the city for the weekend. Mactan became the weekend place,” Fonacier recalls.
“The truism in tourism” is what he calls it. “You want a place to be popular so you have to make it accessible and conveniently located.”
Island in the Pacific
In Cebu, the Tambuli Beach Club was not the only major tourism facility he built. Together with partners, he established the first five-star hotel outside Metro Manila—the Cebu Plaza Hotel. (But like Argao Beach Club, Cebu Plaza Hotel saw its glory fade in the late 1990s.)
“The basic idea was this: I originally thought people just wanted to stay in the city. But things evolved. I could see that if I wanted to let the guests stay longer in Cebu, I had to give them a few days in the city, a few days in the beach. So that’s how the strategy of a city and a resort hotel evolved.”
Then came the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr. in 1983. The country was in upheaval and foreign tourist arrivals dropped.
But Fonacier was undaunted. Ever the entrepreneur, he saw the crisis as an opportunity to market Cebu abroad. He developed the concept of Cebu as “an island in the Pacific,” ignoring the fact that it was within the Philippines and capitalizing on the presence of an international airport in Mactan.
And so Cebu continued to have foreign tourists on its shores amid the political and security chaos the country was facing. The “island in the Pacific” concept got a boost under the governorship of Lito Osmeña who pushed for and promoted “Ce-boom,” a catchphrase for the rapid urbanization of Cebu in the mid-1980s to the early ‘90s.
Giving credit
Like he does with the Philippine Tarsier Foundation he chairs, Fonacier spreads the credit for success to other people.
“I attribute whatever success (in the tourism industry) we had to our original partners, Jensen Mogens and H.P. Kong.” He recalls that Jensen Mogens was one of the biggest tour wholesalers in the US west coast while H.P. Kong was the biggest tour agency in Hong Kong.
“They owned the biggest tour agencies and supplied me the clientele.
We were the first ones to fly charter flights into Cebu from Hong Kong, Japan and the United States. The first balikbayan charter was our charter—straight into Cebu from the west coast,” he remembers.
Before he put up his resorts in Cebu, Fonacier ran a tour service in Manila, the first of its kind in the 1950s when tourism was a new field in the Philippines.
For his indelible contribution to Cebu tourism and business in general, Fonacier was named “adopted son of Cebu City.” The Cebu City Government, under the mayorship of Tomas Osmeña, bestowed on him this honor on Feb. 24, 1994.
Fonacier is not from Cebu, hence “the adopted son” title. He is from Ilocos, the home province of the late President Ferdinand Marcos.
Fonacier is not coy about his being a Marcos crony. Their families, both political and influential in the region, are bound by kinship and friendship.
“Everything I have I paid with my money and from earnings of my businesses. I never asked a single centavo from President Marcos.” This is all he says for the record on the sequestration of many of his assets by the Philippine Commission on Good Government (PCGG).
Off to Bohol
At the height of the sequestrations, Cebu—the place he considered home, the “island in the Pacific” he helped develop and marketed as an international destination spot—was bringing him sadness and sorrow.
“I enjoyed Cebu in the early ‘70s. I had to leave it when it was getting too much like Manila. I wasn’t about to get old in a place that was becoming like Manila,” he answers the question why he left Cebu when the place held so much opportunity for everyone.
But it was more than the traffic, filth and crowd that drove Fonacier away.
He needed to be in a place less politicized and with less mayhem. He bounded for the east.
“Bohol is quiet and it suits a 76-year-old man well. It’s paradise here,” he says, expressing the same zest he had when he packaged Cebu as an island in the Pacific.
Fonacier has seen what unplanned development can do to a place. Cebu is proof of the catastrophe resulting from lack of urban planning.
“Bohol has to be very careful in setting up the parameters of development, that it makes sure that Panglao becoming a Mactan will not happen.” It’s why he helps in the protection and preservation of its marine and coastal resources.
Site of his beach resort, Panglao is part of what is called the Bohol Marine Triangle, the other two being Pamilacan and Balicasag.
The waters shelter whale sharks, stingrays, dolphins and other marine life. The coral reefs, scuba divers attest, are among the best in the world.
“A beach resort is never a competition to a marine sanctuary,” Fonacier says.
Clergy’s help
Fonacier has helped bring together the Philippine Environmental Foundation and the United Nations Development Program, which is now funding the conservation of the triangle. He has found allies in men who begin everything with prayers.
“Bohol’s advantage over Cebu is a clergy that is active in the conservation of natural resources,” he says.
He mentions Fr. Romeo Dompor, who headed the Bohol Integrated Development Foundation Inc. and the Regional Development Council’s social development committee, and Fr. Florante Camacho who was president of the Philippine Tarsier Foundation Inc. Dompor has died but in his place, there is Tagbilaran Bishop Leopoldo Tumulak to whom Fonacier and conservationists turn for support.
“We have to give something back to the community,” Fonacier says. He believes that tourism is not just about bringing the tourists to destination spots; it is also about educating the community and protecting their rich resources.
The industry that Fonacier helped spur is now giving something long due him—the recognition of his entrepreneurship and dedication to put two islands in the Visayas in the international tourism map.
Last Dec. 5, the Department of Tourism awarded the Kalakbay Award for Lifetime Achievement to the Ilokano who has contributed to making Cebu and Bohol among the top tourist destinations not only in the country but in the world as well.
“But I’m just a kibitzer,” Anos still insists. |
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