Department of Tourism Secretary Wanda Corazon Teo revealed on Tuesday that their Mindanao team will push for the Samal-Davao City connecting bridge project to address the growing number of island visitors.
Teo’s revelation was made during her visit to Davao City for the recently concluded Kadayawan 2016 festivities, during which she also sought stakeholders’ support for a Mindanao tourism agenda.
She said latest data from DoT Region XI show Davao City recording 1.70 million visitor arrivals from January to December 2015. Of the total figure, 1.56 million domestic travelers and 128,333 were foreign visitors.
Teo said 14,699 overseas Filipinos visited the island. A total of 161,339 visitors were tallied in August of the same year alone, with 12,142 foreign arrivals and 147,207 local visitors.
The tourism chief added that the DoT intends to make the current international attention to Davao a major turning point for Mindanao tourism.
“The interest in Davao is really high these days, as people want to see how then-mayor now President Rodrigo Duterte has managed the city,” said DoT Mindanao officer-in-charge Eden Josephine David, in reference to increasing visitor arrivals in Davao City at the outset of the Duterte presidency.
David added that the DoT is banking on the new administration’s plan to implement the Mindanao Logistics Infrastructure Network as part of its revitalized infrastructure spending, to help address the connectivity and infrastructure gap of the region.
Marco Polo Davao’s first Filipina general manager Dottie Viajar Wurgler-Cronin, who had a brief meeting with Teo at the sidelines of Kadayawan 2016, said she was confident that “Davao and the entire Mindanao region would be given more attention now that we have a tourism secretary from the region.”
Cronin said she expects Teo will have a “better understanding of what we have and can offer from this region.”