UK think tank: Tourism rebounds in PH, Asean amid economic reopening

The sun sets at the famous beach of Boracay Island in Aklan, Visayas region. INQUIRER PHOTO / RICHARD A. REYES

Tourism in the Philippines and across the Asean has benefited from the continued reopening of economies despite lingering COVID-19 risks, UK-based think Pantheon Macroeconomics said Monday.

“The recovery in tourism in the Asean gathered pace in the second quarter, as the region moved on quickly from sharp but short outbreaks of Omicron earlier this year, ” Pantheon Macroeconomics chief emerging Asia economist Miguel Chanco noted in a report.

More importantly, Chanco said, the strictest pandemic-era border restrictions had been scrapped, almost in sync, starting with the Philippines’ full reopening in February to the most recent decision by Thailand in May, scrapping mandatory on-arrival tests and quarantines for vaccinated visitors.

In the case of the Philippines, Chanco’s estimates showed that foreign tourist arrivals jumped 866 percent in April to June compared with first-quarter arrivals. In the first quarter, visitors from overseas climbed 185 percent quarter-on-quarter.

Across Asean, “the scope for catchup in the second half of 2022 is still immense, even though huge intra-regional disparities are emerging,” he said.

Chanco said the Philippines and Vietnam were outpaced tourist arrivals growth in Indonesia and Thailand.

He nonetheless pointed out that the Philippines and the region benefited from low base effects as they had closed their borders during the most stringent COVID-19 lockdowns and did not allow foreign visitors.

“The big picture advises us not to get carried away by the Philippines’ outperformance and not to be disheartened about Thailand’s underperformance. Remember that the Philippines had one of the smallest Asean tourism industries in the pre-COVID-19 era, with visitors totaling just eight million in 2019, while Thailand was in a world of its own, at 40 million,” Chanco noted.

Despite China’s “zero-COVID” policy, he said visitors from the mainland have been trickling into neighboring Asean.

“Visitors from China were 3 percent of total arrivals in Thailand in the first half of 2022, and reached 6 percent in Vietnam in the year to July. Nevertheless, this still is a trickle of the pre-pandemic traffic, and the near-absence of Chinese tourists will create a hard ceiling for the regional tourism recovery, which likely will be hit in mid-2023,” Chanco said.

Pre-pandemic, Chinese tourists accounted for about one-third of total in Thailand and Vietnam in 2019, about a fifth in the Philippines, and 13 percent in Indonesia, he noted.