Tourism stakeholders urge better targets reporting

MANILA, Philippines — Private sector stakeholders are hoping for a more organized reporting of tourism industry targets under the helm of new Department of Tourism (DOT) Secretary Bernadette Romulo-Puyat for them to be able to respond to the needs of the industry, particularly for the generation of jobs.

Rajah Travel and Tours president Aileen Clemente told The Star the status of targets under the National Tourism Development Plan (NTDP) were not published and distributed to the stakeholders.

Clemente said the industry needs the statistics to know if current sector data on employment is at par with the targets set by NTDP.

“I am confident the new secretary and her team will be able to organize this better,” Clemente said.

Last week, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) reported that there were 5.3 million Filipinos employed in tourism characteristic industries, a 0.9 percent rise from the 5.2 million employment in the year before.

Despite the rise in employment, this was the first time the growth rate fell below one percent since 2001. Previously, the slowest growth was recorded in 2005 at 1.9 percent.

Based on the NTDP, the DOT is targeting tourism sector employment to hit 6.5 million by the end of the Duterte administration in 2022.

“Since there is no comprehensive report on the milestones, we cannot ascertain if the milestones were reached or not, thereby causing the shortage,” Clemente said.

”So I cannot really respond as to how the private sector may assist in this endeavor considering the NTDP was not distributed to us,” Clemente said.

Meanwhile, Tourism Congress of the Philippines president Jojo Clemente told The Star the DOT should also focus on destination development in a bid to create more jobs for the sector.

“One thing that the DOT could focus on would be destination development which would definitely contribute to job generation as new businesses are created,” Clemente said.

He said continued skills training would also create additional employment opportunities in the sector.

“Some other ways (to generate more jobs) would be for the DOT to continue skills training and development in fields such as tour guiding,” Clemente said.

“We have a shortage of foreign-language guides which we can remedy by encouraging our OFWs who have acquired language skills to become guides. DOT has a program in place for this which we wholly support,” Clemente said.

Despite the rise in employment last year, some tourism characteristic industries posted a decline in the number of persons employed, which led to the lower growth rate of employment in 2017.

The recreation, entertainment and cultural services sector posted the largest decline in employments dropping by 11.7 percent last year.

This was followed by retail trade on tourism-characteristic goods with a 1.4 percent decline in employments in the same period.

The accommodation and food and beverage sector managed to be among the industries with the most number of employments at 1.7 million despite contracting 0.9 percent.

In contrast, the passenger transport sector, which employed almost 2 million individuals last year, grew by 3.5 percent.

Travel agents, tour operators and tourism guides posted the largest growth in employments at 6.1 percent last year.

Miscellaneous jobs recorded a 5 percent growth, employing an estimated 826, 000 individuals.