The Bureau of Immigration (BI) said that it expects around 1.5 million total arrivals during the last month of the year.
BI Commissioner Norman Tansingco said that travel trends show a major increase in travelers in 2023. By the Q2 of 2023, Tansingco said that the BI started recording around 1 million arrivals per month, a far cry from the less than 100,000 arrivals per month during the height of the pandemic.
Tansingco shared that for November 2023, the BI recorded a total of 1,160,699 arriving passengers, almost half of which are foreign nationals.
This, Tansingco said, reflects that the aggressive tourism campaigns of the government is working.
Prior to the pandemic, the BI recorded 1.7M arrivals during December. The total number of arriving passengers for the entire year is already 79% higher than in 2022.
Meanwhile, Tansingco shared that Filipino outbound tourism has also bounced back. In November, the agency saw almost 1.1M departures, a figure already very close to the 1.3M recorded in November 2019.
The BI chief shared that they have beefed up their manpower and have deployed augmentation teams and mobile counters to ensure smooth operations during the holiday season.
