THE Philippines has proposed to the governments of South Korea and Japan to set up “special visitor lanes” for fully vaccinated leisure travelers to and from these countries.
This was confirmed by Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo Puyat in a Viber message to the BusinessMirror: “We, the Department of Tourism (DOT) and Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), are working on it. We’d like to pattern this after our arrangement with Singapore.”
Just recently, Manila and Singapore agreed to set up special visitor lanes for their fully vaccinated citizens traveling between both locations starting March 4. The program, knows as Vaccinated Travel Lane in Singapore, will allow fully vaccinated travelers to enter Singapore “quarantine-free,” according to the city state’s Safe Travel website. Visitors to Singapore must have been inoculated with Covid-19 vaccines approved by the World Health Organization. (See https://bit.ly/3t108D1). The same procedure will be applied for arriving Singaporeans in the Philippines.
Romulo Puyat will be leaving for South Korea and Japan this Friday to meet with their respective travel trade groups, in a bid to reopen tourism traffic with the Philippines.
“We are meeting with the biggest media partners, tour operators, travel associations and presenting the reopening of the Philippines, and to personally invite them to the WTTC Global Summit,” she said.
The World Travel and Tourism Council Global Summit will be held in Manila this April 20-22, and the DOT expects to gather some 600 international delegates. This will include CEOs of the largest and most prominent international travel and tourism companies from airlines, hotels and resorts, travel agencies, tour companies, global distribution system, transportation, and allied enterprises; as well as Tourism Ministers and officials from international organizations, such as the United Nations World Tourism Organization.
Reciprocity in vaccine certificates
The DOT chief said, “I am hoping to meet also with my counterparts to raise the possibility of setting up special travel lanes to facilitate the quarantine-free entry between our countries.” Since 2020, Romulo Puyat has been trying to forge travel bubble arrangements between key destinations in the country with South Korea and Japan, to ensure the safe travel of tourists.
In South Korea, travelers from the Philippines (Korean nationals and long-term foreign residents) have to quarantine at their residence for 10 days upon arrival. In Japan, all travelers from the Philippines have to quarantine for three days at a government facility. Romulo Puyat noted, “These quarantine restrictions are holding back their citizens from traveling to the Philippines.”
Meanwhile, the Philippines and the Republic of Korea have agreed to recognize each other’s vaccine certificates, a move that will pave the way for a reinvigoration of people-to-people exchanges.
In a news statement, the DFA said the matter was discussed “during a phone call” between Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro L. Locsin Jr. and South Korean Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong on February 8.
Students, tourists, and business persons from the two countries are expected to benefit from this facilitated travel arrangement. Prior to the pandemic, in 2019, South Koreans topped the list of tourist arrivals at almost 2 million, accounting for 24 percent of the 8.26-million foreign tourists that year.
Despite the global spread of Covid-19 in 2020, arrivals from South Korea continued to top the tourists list at 338,877, or 23 percent of the 1.48-million total arrivals. Philippine borders were closed starting March 2020 and only reopened to fully vaccinated foreign tourists from visa-free countries on February 10, 2022.
From February 10 to 20, 2022 there were 859 tourists who arrived from South Korea, according to data from the DOT. Total tourists reached 25,035 tourists for the period. (See, “PHL benefits from foreigners’ ‘revenge travel’ — tourism execs,” in the BusinessMirror, February 21, 2022.)