Starlets
When President Aquino was interviewed by YouTube World View, one of the questions he answered was about tourism. A YouTube viewer asked about the best province in the country for tourists to visit and, obviously, the always undecided chief executive had no clear answer.
I can’t really blame him because that’s exactly what the Philippines lacks—a star. Because we have all these different places to go to all around these 7,000-plus islands, the country, as a tourism destination, doesn’t have a single unified identity. And the fact that our flagship airport is the worst in the world means that we really have no care for arrivals.
We can’t compete with the rest of the world in terms of industrialization, innovation and all those advanced things that drive healthy economies. What we have are natural resources—some of the most elusive and coveted treasures in the whole wide world. Yet, we’re doing nothing to harness their potential.
We need a kickass marketing plan. We have to sell ourselves. We need to advertise the country like Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. And we are in desperate need of a tourism star—that one place that can represent the entire nation on the tourism front.
Not Boracay. That’s just a beach. It’s a beautiful beach—one of the most beautiful in the world, in fact—but still just a beach. We need a star that can lure tourists all year round; a star for all seasons, so to speak. But no, that place isn’t Batangas as well. Sorry, Governor V.
We don’t have such a place, do we? Then we should plan, build and develop one. The Puerto Princesa Subterranean River in Palawan seems a good place to start (just because it’s not as commercialized as Boracay).
