Camarines Sur Rep. LRay Villafuerte is urging local executives to support the Marcos administration’s efforts to quickly return the country to normalcy by ditching whatever entry restrictions on inbound travellers they might still have in place in their respective localities to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
“Keeping the strict restrictions on the entry of travelers or tourists up to now defeats the purpose of Executive Order No. 7, which President Marcos had issued to further relax anti-COVID health and travel protocols nationwide as part of accelerated government efforts to fully open the economy and rev up the once flourishing tourism sector into an engine of post-pandemic high growth,” he said.
“EO 7 will be rendered useless if international travelers or tourists would finally be enticed anew to go to the Philippines, only to end up being saddled, upon their arrival in the national capital or elsewhere, with troublesome entry requirements in the local places they want to visit. How can Malacañang Palace and the Department of Tourism convincingly tell the rest of the world that the Philippines is truly open for business and for tourists if the burdensome travel protocols that were put up as part of the anti-Covid lockdowns or mobility restrictions are still in place?” he asked.
He backed the appeal of Tourism Secretary Christina Garcia-Frasco on local officials through the Department of the Interior and Local Government to lift entry restrictions on travelers that they had enforced in their respective local government units since the pandemic broke out in 2020.
“It is nice to know that we are starting to see a turnaround in our tourism business, with the number of arrivals hitting 1.9 million at the start of November, or higher than this year’s official target of 1.7 million and 2021’s total arrivals of 1.4 million,” Villafuerte said.
“But there is really no room for complacency here, when one considers that our regional rivals, like Thailand, for instance, already had seveb million tourists as of October, and expects its visitor arrivals to reach a total of 10 million by end-December. We certainly have no way of catching up, much less overtake our ASEAN competitors for tourists when we continue to have barriers like cumbersome local-travel requirements that naturally turn off prospective visitors,” he added.
The downward trend in infection rates should help convince LGU officials to heed the appeal of Garcia-Frasco for them to do away with whatever inbound travel rules remain in their localities, he said Rio N. Araja