“The Philippines since 2017 has become the biggest source of Southeast Asian visitors to Taiwan”
LAST June 12, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan announced the extension for another year of a 14-day visa-free travel privilege to Filipinos. Days later, the Manila Economic and Cultural Office announced the same 14-day visa-free privilege for Tawanese beginning July.
The Taiwan government led by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) started giving these visa-free privileges on July 1, 2017 as part of the New Southbound Policy, which encourages closer economic and cultural relations with its southern neighbors, mostly ASEAN member nations, a departure from the previous Kuomintang administration which fostered close relations to its nearest East Asian neighbor, China.
As a result of the DPP’s testy relations with the mainland, the number of tourists coming from China drastically went down and their tourism sector fell into crisis. By granting visa-free travel to its southern neighbors, Taiwan wanted to fill in the loss from mainland travelers.
Filipinos used to apply for visas to enter its nearest northern neighbor, while getting visa-free privileges to four-hour distant ASEAN neighbors like Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia.
We also enjoyed visa-free privileges when travelling to Hong Kong and Macau in China, whose travel time by air is equal to that of Taiwan.
As a result of this visa-free privilege, Filipinos started visiting Taiwan in droves, a bit tired of making Hong Kong a habitual vacation destination.
From 290,784 Filipino visitors to Taiwan in 2017 when the visa-free entitlement started during the second half of the year, the number grew to 419,105 in 2018, then 509,519 in 2019.
Then the pandemic struck in 2020, and the Philippines went into lockdown in March that year. Still, 77,065 Filipinos visited Taiwan in the first two months of 2020. But only 9,183 visited in 2021, mostly for business, and 64,038 in 2022.
Revenge travel in 2023 brought that number going up to 350,487, and, last year, to 467,157, a return to normal since the 14 day visa-free stay was granted.
The Philippines since 2017 has become the biggest source of Southeast Asian visitors to Taiwan, which is likely the reason why the visa-free travel has again been extended for another year.
On the other hand, the ratio of Taiwanese visitors to the Philippines was only 45 to 60 percent of the visitor influx to our country, reaching its peak in 2019 when 327,273 Taiwanese came to the Philippines.
I would attribute this high number compared to just 240,842 in 2018 to the promotional efforts of the Manila Economic and Cultural Office mostly on social media, together with the DOT. But the pandemic cut short this encouraging start.
Taiwanese officials have been asking the Philippines, represented by MECO, to reciprocate their visa-free privilege, but we could not do this for two principal reasons: One, MECO is a sui generis private corporation registered under the SEC granted by our government with authority to represent the country as a de facto embassy, such as attending to the needs of our nationals in Taiwan, issuing visas and renewing Philippine passports, as well as promoting trade, investments and tourism on top of cultural relations that promote people-to-people amity.
MECO is not funded by the government following the restrictions imposed by our One-China policy, and in fact remits 20 percent of its gross revenues to the Office of the President.
Eighty percent of MECO’s revenues are derived from visas, with most of it available online, where MECO charges 1,200 NT dollars, equivalent to about 1,900 Philippine pesos in 2018, and now equivalent to 2,300 pesos.
The rest of its revenues come from passport renewals which saw a peak in 2017-19 when passport effectivity was increased from 5 year to 10 year validities by the Duterte administration.
Since almost all Filipinos now have 10-year passports, that amount as a percentage of MECO revenues has become practically nil.
For MECO, the reliance on income from the grant of visas is financially existential.
The other reason for not reciprocating the visa-free travel granted by Taiwan at the time was the possible repercussion from the emerging high tourist volume from China, which had become the second largest source of visitors after South Korea, numbering more than a million.
With the icy-cold relations between the Philippines and China these days, that number has dwindled and it is likely that the DOT is looking to Taiwan as a major source of inbound travelers, which at the moment is our sixth largest source after South Korea, the US, Japan, Australia, and Canada. Many of the North American visitors are actually balikbayans.
On the other hand, MECO’s finances will nose-dive, and it’s existence as a private corporation not subsidized by Philippine government revenues fatally impaired, with savings possibly allowing it to self-finance operations for only a year or so at most.
How this will play out, and whether this visa-free privilege will entice more Taiwanese tourists to visit here will be next Monday’s topic.
