By Ahmed Cuizon
Notting Hill, a street in London that Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant made famous by a romcom flick has had enough of tourist crowds. Its residents now want to curb its number of visitors so they can preserve whatever privacy they have left.
Antonio Pigafetta’s hometown, Venice, has also imposed hefty fees on tourists to limit its number of visitors daily. For years, Venetians have complained of how mass tourism has severely affected their privacy and quality of life.
Here at home, people are bitching about a drop in the country’s number of tourists. Last year, the Department of Tourism logged 5.9 million international tourist arrivals, way below its target of 7.7 million. The decline has continued to roll into 2025, it seems, as only 1.9 million foreigners visited the country in the first four months of the year.
Tourism, of course, remains a major source of jobs and livelihood for 4.5 million Filipinos. The industry accounts for more than 12 percent of the Philippines’ Gross Domestic Product. Holding a promise of prosperity to many, economic experts call it “the sunshine industry.”
But the sunshine may not last for long. In places like Lapu-Lapu City, mass tourism has led to adverse effects like environmental degradation which happens when boatloads of island-hopping tourists pollute the seas with increased human activity that generate waste and sewage.
In Oslob, whale sharks are provided with artificial feeding to entice them to converge near boatloads of tourists. Over time, the creatures learn to depend on humans for food instead of naturally foraging. The whale sharks’ altered behavior affects the overall ecological balance.
In Moalboal’s sardine run, irresponsible tourist behavior like touching the sardines or using harmful chemical sunscreens harm the environment. Aside from producing trash, large numbers of boats and swimmers in the ocean also cause dangers for marine life.
Clearly, regulation has to come into place. Local authorities are thus imposing environmental fees (envi fees) aimed at mitigating the negative impacts of tourism and to help fund conservation and rehabilitation efforts.
Yet for various reasons, many industry players won’t have any of it, refusing to understand how mass tourism strains the environment by causing pollution and the loss of natural resources.
For one, pumpboat and Airbnb operators that cater to island-hopping tourists erroneously claim that envi fees are causing the tourism downslide. They would rather maximize profits now than sustain the industry’s economic benefits well into the future.
But envi fees are not just about raising funds for environmental projects. It’s also about controlling the number of tourists in a destination. If tourism is supposed to generate economic benefits for our people, then those who avoid places that collect envi fees aren’t probably the kind of tourists that we want.
Spending tourists should be our market, the kind that won’t hesitate to pay envi fees that support eco-friendly projects. If such fees are effective at sorting out those who have no means to pay for our tourism amenities, industry players should therefore welcome it. That way, we also reduce the strain that mass tourism brings.