BI projects 1.5M arrivals in PH over 2023 Christmas holidays

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 11) — The number of travelers arriving in the Philippines in December at the height of the Christmas holidays is expected to reach 1.5 million, the Bureau of Immigration (BI) said Monday.

As early as the second quarter, BI Commissioner Norman Tansingco said the agency logged one million arrivals a month in 2023.

In November, the agency saw 1,160,699 arrivals, with almost half of them foreign nationals.

Tansingco also said there were 1.1 million departures in November, signaling a resurgence in outbound tourism.

In response to the tourism boom, Tansingco said that the BI deployed augmentation teams and mobile counters to beef up capacity during the holiday season.

The Department of Tourism (DOT) earlier said tourist arrivals from January to September surpassed 4 million.

READ: PH surpasses 4M tourist arrivals as of Sept. 2023 DOT

Last year, the country saw 6.12 million total arrivals, a major increase compared to the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The BI said there were 3.5 million arrivals in 2020. Around 1.3 million of these were international tourists, according to the DOT.

In 2019, before the pandemic, the BI saw 16.7 million arrivals throughout the entire year. Of this,1.7 million came to the Philippines in December alone.