Tour industry critical of the new DOT slogan

For those of you girls who pinned their hopes that someday you might end up marrying royalty, we have some bad news for you. Britain’s most eligible royal, Prince William, second in line to the throne, has announced his engagement to Ms. Catherine “Kate” Middleton. No doubt that the wedding next year will become the wedding of the decade. It has the trappings of the Prince Charles and Diana wedding, which sadly ended in a broken marriage and worse, Diana dead in a broken Mercedes 600. Let’s just hope that this marriage will be for keeps! So time for you girls to find another Prince Charming elsewhere.

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Yesterday, I wrote an article in my Philippine Star column chastising the unwelcome decision by the Department of Tourism (DoT) in coming up with a new website and replacing the now famous and very well accepted worldwide “WoW Philippines” tourism campaign. The new slogan is “Pilipinas Kay Ganda.” Wow! What stupidity is this? Our tourism slogan should at the very least be in English so that the majority of foreigners would understand us. Putting it in Tagalog will certainly not work in our favor!

Now it seems that the opposition against this slogan is snowballing not just on the social networks like Twitter, but also by the Federation of Tourism Industries of the Philippines, Inc. (FTIP) whose President Alejandra Clemente was quoted in the front page story in The Philippine Star yesterday saying, “The slogan did not ignite much excitement. Maybe they rushed in coming out with a new brand. But what we need is something that would create a great impact.”

This is what we get under the administration of Pres. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III who placed Mr. Alberto Lim as Tourism Chief whose only claim to fame is their common hatred for former Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA). Mr. Lim was head of the Makati Business Club (MBC) who, during the last election campaign, came out strongly attacking GMA and pursuing the candidacy of PNoy. Now that he’s in power, Mr. Lim was “rewarded” with the position as Tourism Boss.

I have never met with the FTIP Pres. Clemente, but I fully concur with her observations that the new slogan did not ignite any excitement in the Tourism industry. But it did ignite indignation within the tourism industry who believes that Mr. Lim is a square peg in a round hole. Worse, after more than a hundred days in power, tourism industry insiders are saying, “Is this all that that P.Noy could do?” Indeed, the new website isn’t something to lord over as websites then to be updated every now and then.

But changing the slogan into Pilipinas Kay Ganda means, throwing away the hundreds of thousands of WoW Philippines posters in many travel agencies and offices all over the world. Mind you, WoW Philippines has already proven to be a catchy phrase, which many foreigners could easily understand. The reason why we had record tourism arrivals in the last two years. Now, in one stupid move, they threw that away! Just another day in the “palpak-ridden” Aquino administration.

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As if they do not have enough projects on their hands, the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation, Inc. (RAFI) has embarked on another development project, this time funding the Tambuyog Development Center for the Malhiao Badian Coastal Education Center in Barangay Malhiao, Badian Cebu. This is a project that aims to make the people living there sensitive to the importance of coastal resources, the coral reefs, mangroves and estuaries and encourage their conservation and protection making them stakeholders of these coastal resources.

RAFI encourages educating the residents of the barangay; hence, it is piloting the Coastal Education for Elementary students from Grade Five upwards. There’s nothing like getting our children to realize the importance of these coastal resources so they could help inform their parents what they learned in school and hope that their parents too would learn from what the kids learned. This should trigger a new generation of children that embraces a culture of protecting the conservation of coastal resources. If only the Department of Education (DepEd) replicated this program all over the country, we’d have more people involved in guarding our precious coastal resources.

 Yesterday, RAFI President Roberto “Bobby” Aboitiz signed the memorandum of agreement for this P4,446,250 project, of which RAFI will grant Php 2,648,000. This means that this project can immediately proceed with five public elementary schools in Badian, Cebu. Just makes me wonder, what would we do without RAFI?

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