THE Department of Tourism (DOT) is pushing to ease visa policies for Indian nationals in a bid to get a bigger share of tourists from India, the world’s most populous country that is expected to see a tourism boom in the next few years.
In 2024, over 5 million Indians traveled to Southeast Asia, but only 79,000 of them visited the Philippines, Tourism Secretary Christina Frasco said in a news forum on January 22.
While the number seems meager, it is already a 12.8 percent improvement from the number of Indians who arrived in the Philippines in 2023, she said.
“There is still so much room to grow as far as the Philippines is concerned, especially that we are the world’s leading dive destination,” she said. “Napaka-popular ng Pilipinas sa mga Indians especially sa wedding tourism, diving and other tourism products.”
Last year, Thailand welcomed around 2 million Indian tourists, just behind Chinese and Malaysian tourists.
Also in 2024, some 501,000 Indian tourists went to Vietnam, according to data from Vietnam’s National Authority of Tourism.
The DOT’s renewed push to attract more tourists from the world’s most populous country comes after the Philippines recorded only 5.64 million tourist arrivals in 2024, well below its target of 7.7 million visitors from overseas.
Frasco attributed the drop in tourist arrivals from China to the suspension of e-visas for Chinese nationals in 2023, a policy set in place after the Department of Justice called for stricter visa regulations to curb the influx of illegal online gaming workers to the Philippines.
The DOT hopes that the Philippines can ease visa restrictions for other nationalities, underscoring that other Southeast Asian countries have already waived visas for nearly all nationalities after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“A liberalized visa policy for Indian nationals would greatly help in terms of bringing them in,” the DOT chief said, noting that so far the connectivity from India “is only to Manila.”
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has already instructed the Department of Foreign Affairs “to ensure that the efficiency and the effectivity of the electronic visa system is improved, and that the connectivity to the Philippines is also increased through more direct flights from various cities in India to different destinations in the Philippines,” Frasco said.
The Philippines is also working to increase the number of flights and seats between various destinations to and from India. (ABS-CBN News)
