Since last year, we travel bloggers, as well as the stakeholders and those in the know, already knew that our Department of Tourism (DOT) was coming up with the Visit Philippines Year 2015 (VPY 2015) campaign. Last year was Visit Malaysia Year 2014, so it isn’t hard to surmise that the idea came from our most proximate ASEAN neighbor.
To be honest, we haven’t heard much about the campaign throughout, save for a few press conferences, events, and advertisements, until a couple of weeks back when the Malacanang Palace came up with Proclamation 991 that declares VPY 2015, which is clearly four months too late.
The objectives are simple—to pull up visitor arrivals and tourism receipts and bank on the success of the It’s More Fun in the Philippines campaign. But the execution is far too lackluster.
What the campaign has so far significantly achieved are a handful of fresh commercials, presence in international travel expos, a micro-site, and a calendar that collates the events happening this year. But in the Philippines itself, there’s no big gimmick that promotes the event, not even a reminder in tourist spots that it is VPY 2015. Do Filipinos and the majority of foreign visitors even know that it is VPY 2015? I’m no expert, but at the rate the DOT is going, I’m at a loss how this marketing effort will ever be effective.
Mounting a successful campaign is indubitably expensive, and unfortunately, there’s not a lot of funding the DOT can work on, given that tourism isn’t even among the top ten priorities in the 2015 appropriations. See, that’s where the problem lies and will lieuntil such a time when this country sees what money sustainable tourism can rake in. They should’ve treated VPY 2015 as an investment with great economic returns, but it seems to be an opportunity missed.
For comparison, just last year, Malaysia earmarked a whopping 115 million USD for tourism in conjunction with their Visit Malaysia Year 2014 campaign. With clear-cut objectives of bringing 28 million tourist arrivals and 76 million MYR in tourism receipts, the campaign was well-thought-out and well-executed through a series of big events and festivals, a song and music video, generous budgets on promotions, and an opening program in Kuala Lumpur with impressive 3D mapping, fireworks, and a whole lot of pageantry.
Surely, to compare Philippines and Malaysia given our countries’ income levels would be like apples and oranges, yet there is a glaring difference on how tourism is placed as a priority on the national agenda. In Malaysia, locals are enjoined to be nationalistic and take a holiday in their own country (cuti-cuti), while here, sadly, the budget is too negligible to even cover domestic markets.
The fact that the proclamation was only signed on March 30th, short of four months after VPY 2015 was supposed to have started, is concrete proof of what little effort the government is exerting on this campaign and on tourism in general. It’s unlikely that they can do anything better at this point, given how Philippine bureaucracy and funding mechanisms work, yet I’m positive they can plan the next VPY better—perhaps in 2020 when there’s a new president who hopefully possesses the strong will to stimulate the potential of Philippine tourism.