The Philippines Is Taking a Long and Confusing Path to Tourism Recovery
Skift Take
For a nation that relies on tourism as a significant engine of growth — the sector had contributed around 13 percent to the gross domestic product — it's time for national and local government officials to move in one direction and attack the Covid problem together.
Veteran tour operator Jose C. Clemente III was perplexed. The Philippine government on July 3 announced that vaccinated individuals no longer needed to submit negative Covid-19 test results prior to their travel from one quarantined zone to another.
In the Philippines, which has garnered a reputation for having the longest lockdown in the world, areas are grouped into quarantined zones according to the magnitude of Covid infections. With the new policy, any vaccinated Filipino can now travel from a low community quarantine zone to high community quarantine zone, and vice versa. This directly impacts many leisure destinations in the country, many of which are under different quarantine statuses.
And their lies the problem: confusion, and ever-changing policies that have hampered the Philippines recovery and certainly its grand plans from pre-Covid to take tourism to a new level.
Clemente, who is also the president of the powerful Tourism Congress of the Philippines, told Skift that "while we welcome any initiatives to make traveling around the country more conven
