Cambodia and Burma will leave behind PH soon

The column last Tuesday of my friend and colleague, Mr. Tony Lopez, entitled “Cambodia will overtake PH tourism in 2 years” (MT, 05 August 2013) is a real eye-opener. It showed that our tourism or hospitality industry is not doing that great, as President Benigno S. Aquino 3rd made it appear in his 2013 State of the Nation Address (SONA) on 22 July. Worse, as many things in his SONA, the roseate picture given by the President is very misleading and it appears to deceive both the listeners and readers.

President B.S. Aquino 3rd declared that “. . . we registered 4.3 million tourist arrivals in our country—another new record high. This figure is a 21.4-percent increase from when we assumed office in 2010, when only an estimated 3.1 million tourists visited our country.” Yet if we compare the figures on arrivals of visitors with the other countries in the region, Cambodia’s tourism has actually grown at a faster rate than the Philippines in the past three years (2010-2012).