Tourism Secretary Alberto Aldaba Lim is targeting to substantially increase the number of Chinese tourists coming to the Philippines.
In a statement, Lim said this was highly possible considering the historic ties between the Philippines and China, and their close proximity to each other.
Lim said Shao Qiwei, head of China National Tourism Administration, was very supportive to his appeal for help in convincing Chinese tourists to go to the Philippines.
“I asked him to make the numbers grow. Right now, we have only 187,000 Chinese tourists from the mainland, not counting those from Hong Kong or Macau or Taiwan. Whereas we have 740,000 Koreans and 600,000 Japanese. Hopefully, by the end of six years, we would have substantially more tourists coming from China.”
Although the Chinese official recognized the closer ties between China and the Philippines, he stressed that the key to more tourists from China was access.
The Chinese official’s statement made Lim optimistic that the pocket open skies policy and the rising economy of China would boost the Department of Tourism’s chances of hitting its targets.
The DoT is aggressively working on promoting the Philippines to the Chinese market as China authorities projected that the number of outbound Chinese tourists would reach 100 million by 2020.
Lim visited China several times and even led a tourism mission to China before his upcoming road show in North America.
In a meeting last October in Shanghai, Lim invited the chair of Jin Jiang, the largest hotel group in China, to invest in the country by building three-star or budget hotels, as these are the preferred accommodations of Chinese tourists.