AS the bulk of tourists in the country starts arriving for the holidays, the planned volt-in of the arrival systems of different government agencies continues to be problematic. Passengers landing at Manila’s airport are still dealing with an unfriendly e-Travel website and confusing queues, despite the relief promised under phase 2 of the new arrival scheme.
Speaking to the BusinessMirror, traveler Bebeth Timbol said the new e-Travel form, on the one hand, “was easy enough to fill up, but it was a long form with a lot of unclear questions. You can fill it out on your phone and you just have to show the [resulting] QR Code to the same people, as what happened when the One Health Pass (OHP) was used.” Timbol arrived on December 3 at terminal 2 of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia) at 7 pm on a flight from Osaka. She had previously traveled in October, and used the OHP upon arrival.
Rajah Tours Philippines president Jose C. Clemente III, on the other hand, said a number of his balikbayan (homecoming Filipino) clients have complained, that the form “is difficult to fill out on the computer.” Balikbayans often make up the bulk of the arrivals during the Christmas season, coming from the United States, Canada, Europe and the Middle East. Prior to the pandemic, almost 19 percent of balikbayans arrived in December.
Data from the Department of Tourism (DOT) showed arrivals of Philippine passport holders permanently residing abroad have already started climbing from 39,674 in September; 47,126 in October; to 48,709 in November. (Philippine passport holders usually exclude overseas Filipino workers.)
Passengers still line up twice
The Bureau of Immigration (BI) described the recent issues on arrival services as “birth pains,” and fingered the Bureau of Quarantine (BOQ) as the culprit, even as Commissioner Norman Tansingco said in a separate news statement that the newly launched e-Travel platform “would allow faster and easier processing for arriving passengers.”
Its other partner agencies include the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), the DOT, Bureau of Customs, Department of Transportation, and BI’s parent unit, the Department of Justice.
Compared to the OHP, where passengers merely upload a PDF of their Vaccination Certificate, Timbol said with the e-Travel site (etravel.gov.ph), “You manually input your vaxx details. So you have to open it up, which is hard to do if you’re filling it up using your phone.” She also described the site as being “too reactive,” or not user-friendly; with one misplaced touch or option erroneously chosen from a dropdown menu, “You have to scroll through the options again to pick the right one. It takes several tries.”
She added, arriving passengers still have to line up twice—one for the scanning of the QR code—and another for the Immigration line, when the BI earlier promised the integration of its system with the e-arrival system of the Department of Health/BOQ and DOT beginning December 1. “From the hallway, after disembarking from the plane, you turn left to scan your QR code, then go to another line for Immigration.” (See, “Immigration to volt in with DOH/BOQ, DOT arrivals system,” in the BusinessMirror, November 25, 2022.)
More BI staff, stations needed
She likewise noted there were separate stations for Filipinos, while the regular Immigration kiosks are now designated for foreign passport holders. “But those stalls [for Filipino passport holders] need more airport people to help travelers [scan their e-passports]. If someone encounters difficulties in scanning their passports and doing the biometrics, it holds up the line. Some of us just moved back to the regular Immigration lines as these cleared up faster.”
Timbol also suggested that BI add more stations: “Three lanes will not cut it…and it wasn’t even busy on the night we arrived.”
Reached for comment, the BI said: “The birth pains encountered on the initial phase of implementation [of the e-Travel platform] are being addressed. The BOQ is normalizing its procedures, and we expect the removal of the QR code scanning on the second phase of the implementation.”
It added, “The government is doing step by step streamlining, and the system is being managed by competent hands under the DICT. We see that the implementation of this is a big step towards harmonizing border procedures, and lessening paper requirements for arriving passengers.”
Image credits: Ninlawan Donlakkham | Dreamstime.com