Published on : Thursday, April 18, 2019
This tourism figure also shows that some 67,000 visitors more than the 553,074 tourists who visited the island around the same time in 2018.
Of the 1st-quarter-of-2019 visitors, 357,041 (or 57%) were foreigners, 240,745 were local tourists, and 22,148 were overseas workers of Philippines.
From April 1 to April 15, the Malay Municipal Tourism Office shows about 107,218 tourists. Of the figure, the international tourists accounted for 44% or 47,450 arrivals.
The majority of foreign visitors are from China and Korea, accounting for 80% of the total number of foreigners visiting the island. Most of the foreign tourists hail from the United States, Taiwan, Russia, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
The government of Philippines is upgrading its popular beach destination Boracay Island to welcome more international tourists and to address environmental and infrastructure issues.
Boracay Island reopened to all the tourists on October 26, 2018 after it was closed for 6 months, by order of President Rodrigo Duterte who called the tourism hot spot a “cesspool.”
The government of Philippines also limited the number of tourists who could visit Boracay Island daily, even restricting the number of hotels that could accommodate visitors. The Department of Tourism in Philippines reported that Boracay Island currently has 12,083 hotel rooms and 339 accredited establishments for accommodations.
In part due to cruise ship arrivals, Boracay Island has seen a major increase in the number of tourists in recent years. In the year 2018, Boracay Island welcomed about 941,068 tourists. In 2017, before the closure of the island for the environmental cleansing, the island drew two million tourists.