BI sees 1.5M visitor arrivals in December

AS international travel gets better, the Bureau of Immigration (BI) expects a huge uptick in the number of visitor arrivals, probably hitting 1.5 million monthly or 50,000 daily by the end of December, a far cry from an average of 3,000 per day at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

«We foresee a major surge in passenger arrivals and departures during the Christmas holiday because of the opening of borders, enabling the travel and tourism industry to quickly recover and continue to rebound from the negative impact of the pandemic,» said Immigration Commissioner Norman Tansingco on Monday.

Tansingco added that the upward trend in passenger arrivals started during the second quarter of the year, when the bureau recorded monthly arrivals of nearly 1 million in a month.

For November 2023, the BI recorded 1,160,699 arriving passengers. Nearly half were foreigners.

Tansingco said that the uptrend might indicate that the government's aggressive tourism campaigns are working.

Prior to the pandemic, the BI recorded 1.7 million arrivals during December. The total number of arriving passengers for the entire year is already 79 percent higher than 2022 figures.

Tansingco said that Filipino outbound tourism has also bounced back. In November, the agency saw almost 1.1 million departures, very close to the 1.3 million recorded in November 2019.

The bureau has beefed up its manpower and deployed augmentation teams and mobile counters to ensure smooth operations during the holiday season.

«The BI has sufficient immigration officers on duty to serve the traveling public during the holiday rush,» said Tansingco.

Aside from additional manpower resources, the BI has also opened its «e-gates» at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport and the Clark International Airport in Pampanga and other major ports of entry to avoid long queues when arrivals were at their peak.

The BI said that e-gates cut the processing time for passengers from 45 seconds to 8 seconds.