BI expects 1.5M arrivals this month

THE Bureau of Immigration expects around 1.5 million arrivals this month based on trends showing a major increase in travelers this year.

Immigration Commissioner Norman Tansingco yesterday said the agency started recording around one million arrivals per month since the second quarter of this year, a far cry from the less than 100,000 arrivals per month during the height of the pandemic.

Tansingco said last month, the agency recorded a total of 1,160,699 arriving passengers, almost half of which were foreigners.

Before the pandemic, the BI recorded 1.7 million arrivals in December of each year.

“The total number of arriving passengers for the entire year is already 79 percent higher than in 2022,” Tansingco said, adding that Filipino outbound tourism has also bounced back.

Last month, the agency recorded almost 1.1 million departures, a figure very close to the 1.3 million recorded in November 2019.

To cope with the continued increase in arrivals and departures this holiday season, Tansingco said the agency has “beefed up their manpower and have deployed augmentation teams and mobile counters to ensure smooth operations.”

The BI has more than 900 immigration officers deployed at the Ninoy Aquino International Airports and other international airports in the country.

As previously practiced, Tansingco said immigration officers are not allowed to go on vacation leaves during this time of the year.