Mercedes Hutton

Destinations Known | Philippines to offer quarantine-free travel to tourists from places on its green list, but main source market South Korea isn’t currently included

South Korea accounted for almost a quarter of all arrivals to the Philippines in 2019 but is on Manila’s yellow list, subject to strict entry requirements

Less than a third of the Philippine population is fully vaccinated, the latest data shows, and the country is one of the worst hit by Covid-19 in the region

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Tourists board a boat on a Boracay beach in the Philippines on December 10, 2018. More than 90 per cent of tourism workers have been fully vaccinated in the country’s tourism-dependent destinations such as Boracay, compared with only 30 per cent of the country as a whole. Photo: Getty Images

Mercedes Hutton

Published: 8:45am, 24 Nov 2021

On January 6, 2012, the Philippines Department of Tourism unveiled a new tourism campaign: “It’s more fun in the Philippines.” It went viral. For a cyber-minute, it topped global Twitter trends and, according to the branding agency behind the slogan, “Google searches for the Philippines increased by 231% and the country’s tourist volumes hit an all-time high of 4.3 million, outgrowing leading rival market, Malaysia.”

Now, almost a decade later, the archipelagic country is keen to impress on international tourists how much “more fun” awaits when they return, in the latest campaign from its official tourism body. And that return could be soon, with the Philippine News Agency (PNA) reporting that the nation will be “reopening to fully vaxxed tourists before year-end”.

“Allowing tourists from green countries or territories that have the majority of its population vaccinated and with low infection rate will greatly help our tourism efforts – increasing tourist arrivals and receipts among others,” tourism secretary Bernadette Romulo-Puyat said in a statement. “The move will likewise aid in bolstering consumer confidence, which is a large contributor to our gross domestic product.”

There are currently 44 places on the Philippines’ green list, including mainland China, India, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Taiwan. Notably absent is the nation’s largest pre-pandemic source market, South Korea, which accounted for 22.48 per cent of all 2019 arrivals, or 1.98 million visitors. (China followed closely, sending 1.74 million tourists that year, but travellers from the Middle Kingdom are unlikely to cross any borders until the country’s complicated quarantine regime has been lifted, or at least relaxed.)

A poster for the Philippines’ viral 2012 tourism campaign. Photo: Philippines Department of Tourism

South Korea sits on the yellow list (along with everywhere not on the green list, except the Faroe Islands and the Netherlands, which make up the red list). Unlike fully vaccinated foreign arrivals from green origins – who just need to show a negative RT-PCR test taken within 72 hours of departure to enter the Philippines – inoculated arrivals on the yellow list are subject to strict entry requirements, including a “facility based quarantine” stint. Frankly, it doesn’t sound appealing.