The Bureau of Immigration (BI) said that the number of departing passengers kept increasing after the holiday season.
The BI said it recorded around 30,000 to 31,000 departures per day for all international airports. The number is slightly higher than the 21,000 to 25,000 departures processed during the first week of December.
The BI records showed that for January to December 2023, they have processed a total of 13,224,308 departing passengers. The peak month for departure was December, which saw 1,201,484 departures.
More than seven million Filipinos also departed during this period, consisting mostly of overseas Filipino workers and tourists traveling for leisure abroad.
“A lot of Filipinos have travelled this year as countries reopened their borders after the pandemic,” Tansingco said.
Prior to the pandemic, the BI recorded more than eight million departing Filipinos.
South Koreans have the highest number of outbound travel for foreign nationals in 2023 with more than 1.55 million departures, followed by Americans with 1.19 million, and Chinese nationals with 406,000.
