PH welcomes more tourists than expected in 2023

Philippine Secretary of Tourism Christina Frasco said that the country is making a lot of progress toward their goal of having more than 4.8 million foreign tourists by 2023.

Since the beginning of the year, the country has already had more than 80% of its yearly goal with 3.87 million foreign tourist arrivals. At this pace, it will be easy to get over 5 million visitors by the end of 2023. Frasco shared this good news at the opening of the Philippine Travel Exchange 2023 in Cebu.

During this time, tourism brought in Php316.9 billion ($5.58 billion). According to the Philippine News Agency, most of this money came from tourists from South Korea, the United States, and Japan.

Frasco talked about how President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s government was determined to make the Philippines the most important tourist destination in Asia. This includes supporting sustainability, building tourism communities all over the country, getting the business sector more involved in preserving history, expanding the country’s tourism goods, and starting projects that will help everyone involved in the tourism sector.

Even though the Asian Development Bank (ADB) changed its prediction for the Philippines’ economic growth in 2023 from 6% to 5.7%, these developments are still substantial. The change is caused by things like inflation and problems in the world economy. Even so, GDP forecasts for the country stay the same at 6.2%, thanks to strong family spending and more money spent by the government on building and social services.

Pavit Ramachandran, who is the country head for the Philippines at the Asian Development Bank, said he is confident in the country’s steady growth and stressed how strong the economy was, even though it was expected to slow down in 2023. The economy is expected to grow because of public investments, private spending driven by low jobless rates, steady payments from Filipinos living abroad, and a strong services sector, especially tourism.

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PH Tourism Agency touts 3M int’l arrivals this year; SoKor forms majority of tourists.

Original story by: IAG