Davao City—The Kadayawan executive committee has vowed to make this year’s festival the biggest event in the history of the city.
On Monday, the 33rd Kadayawan sa Davao was formally launched to the media, revealing a more grandiose lineup of activities that will showcase the cultures of the 11 tribes in the city.
Festival director Gatchi Gatchalian Jr. said the festival will be longer, with bigger prizes and more activities than in previous years.
“Last year’s Kadayawan festival is already big, but we want to make it bigger,” Gatchalian said. “It will not be hard for us to market Kadayawan, since the stigma of Martial Law was already lifted.”
He said several new sponsors like SM Development Corp. and Philippine Airlines that are willing to help the city put up a grandiose Kadayawan that the people will enjoy.
City Tourism Officer Regina Rosa Tecson said officials are expecting more than 200,000 local and foreign tourist to join the festival this year.
“Last year, we recorded more than 185,000 tourists through our hotel occupancy data. This year, we expect to exceed that and raise the number to 200,000 or more,” Tecson said.
For this year’s festival, the Kadayawan committee prepared a budget of P44 million, P12 million from the City Government. The remaining P32 million will be gathered by its private partners.
“We are really optimistic that we will reach the P32 million budget since we received positive response from the sponsors,” Gatchalian said.
“We will also give incentives to winning team of the indak-indak competition. An additional P500,000 will be given to the winning team if they reached a score of 95% or more,” he said.
Gatchalian explained they put up the incentive to encourage the performers to do even better than the previous years, to lessen their props and to add more dancing to their performances.
This year’s Kadayawan festival will officially open on August 10 at the Magsaysay Park.