Baguio ready to accept 1,000 visitors daily

December 7, 2020 Community Billboard

BAGUIO CITY 3 December 2020 – Tourists from Luzon wanting to spend their Yuletide vacation in the city can still register in the city’s registration platform for visitors after city officials decided to increase the daily tourist arrivals from 500 to 1,000.
Supervising Tourism Operations Officer Engr. Aloysius C. Mapalo reported the decision to increase the daily tourist arrivals in the city is part of the strategic program of the city to gradually, safely and responsibly open the local tourism industry to help revive the economy for people to have income to hurdle the heavy impact of the quarantine measures to sustenance.
He said that based on the data from the city’s registration platform, visita.baguio.gov.ph., there are nearly 3,200 approved travel requests to the city from December 1-31, 2020 with an expected increase in the coming days with some 200 to 300 travel requests being approved daily.
Earlier, the city government opened the tourism industry for prospective visitors from the Ilocos Region through the so-called Baguio- Region I tourism bubble dubbed as the Ridge and Reef tourism corridor.
However, the said endeavor did not turn out as expected with only 15 approved visits to the city by tourists from Region I on October 1-22, 2020.
Mapalo claimed that when the city expanded the coverage of visitors to the whole of Luzon, some 6,207 approved visits were made from October 22 to November 29, 2020, aside from the more than 7,000 approved travel requests for business and other essential travels to the city under another platform, hdf.baguio.gov.ph., which indicates that the local tourism industry is slowly on the way to recover.
According to him, 80 percent of the approved travel requests to the city are from tourists residing in the National Capital Region (NCR) while the remaining 20 percent are from other regions in Luzon.
The city tourism officer disclosed that the number of travel requests to the city is expected to increase in the coming days as indicated by the increasing number of daily applications from visitors wanting to spend a longer Yuletide break in the city.
While the approved travel requests to the city is still a far cry from the daily tourist arrivals in the city prior to the prevailing health crisis, Mapalo underscored that efforts are being done to help control the spread of the Corona Virus Disease (COVID) 2019 following projections from health authorities on the possible surge in cases during the Yuletide season due to unavoidable gatherings among families to celebrate the Christmas and New Year through regulated means.
The city developed the online registration platform for prospective visitors to serve as a database to provide details for the local government and concerned government agencies to decide on how to undertake tourism-related programs, projects and activities.
Dexter A. See/ABN