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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Bora rehab may be shorter; government details work plan

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GOVERNMENT officials said Friday they will meet the six-month deadline to clean up Boracay, even as the tourism industry scrambled to manage the fallout from its temporary shutdown that threw into chaos trips planned by hundreds of thousands of tourists.

In a press conference Friday, Environment Undersecretary Jonas Leones said there would be no extension to the six-month shutdown that begins April 26.

“Just to emphasize, this six months is a maximum period. We can shorten the closure, depending on the progress of the rehabilitation efforts to be done in Boracay,” Leones said.

“We do not want to extend the suffering of those on Boracay who are affected by the closure,” he said in a mix of Filipino and English.

Some projects, such as the laying of sewage pipes, would continue after the closure period, Leones said.

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The rehabilitation effort will also seek to improve Boracay’s drainage system, better handle the large amount of garbage from residents and tourists, encroachment on easements, forestland and wetlands, and the degradation of certain areas.

Leones said the Department of Environment and Natural Resources has already issued orders to vacate to hundreds of establishments.

Earlier this week, President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the once-idyllic white-sand resort closed to tourists for up to six months from April 26, after calling the country’s top tourist draw a “cesspool” tainted by raw sewage.

Hundreds of Boracay hotels, as well as restaurants, tour operators and business establishments were on Friday undertaking the daunting process of unwinding bookings for rooms, flights, weddings and other events and facilities.

“Some people are cursing us… it’s nasty,” Hotel Sales and Marketing Association president Christine Ibarreta said.

“I hope [there will be] no mess and no chaos,” she added. “We just want it to be orderly.”

Ibarreta said “hundreds of thousands” of bookings made as far as two years in advance—potentially worth millions of dollars for hotels and other tourism services—would have to be either canceled and refunded, or rebooked.

“Some people are okay but some people cannot understand,” tour operator Clang Garcia said, adding clients are typically offered a refund or an alternate destination “to save the account.”

Domingo Enerio, the retired former head of the government’s Tourism Promotions Board, said some of the canceled bookings contained non-refundable conditions and would have to be renegotiated or credited for future use.

Under the government plan, police, or even soldiers, will be deployed to keep away tourists from the island, while residents will be issued special identification cards to ensure continued access while Boracay is rehabilitated.

Domestic airlines announced on Thursday they would scale back the number of flights to the jumping-off point for the 1,000-hectare island.

Industry officials say Boracay accounts for about 20 percent of the country’s tourism revenues, and fear a longer-term fallout on the Philippines’ image as a tourism destination.

“Overall it looks bleak,” Enerio, the former tourism official, said.

“Boracay will definitely take a hit and the Philippine tourism industry will take a hit,” he added.

BORACAY CLOSURE. Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu shows to media the Map of Boracay Circumferential Road and announces the closure order for the foreign and local tourists for the rehabilitation of Boracay Island during a news conference at the DENR office in Quezon City. Manny Palmero

The threat of closure first emerged in February when Duterte blasted the island’s hotels, restaurants and other businesses, accusing them of dumping sewage directly into the sea.

Authorities said Thursday some businesses were using the island’s drainage system to send untreated sewage into its surrounding turquoise waters.

Ibarreta, the hotel industry official, said the six-month tourist ban would likely mean the industry will lose some of its 17,000 workers in Boracay.

“So we’ll have to retrain people [after the ban is lifted] and that’s expensive,” she added.

Major airlines, meanwhile, are mounting additional flights to other popular tourist destinations to recover the expected revenue losses from the planned six-month closure of Boracay.

Cebu Pacific and its sister airline Cebgo, Philippine AirAsia and Philippine Airlines have all reduced flights to Kalibo and Caticlan as a result of the six-month closure.

In an interview on the ANC news channel, PAL’s chief customer experience officer said they would add flights to other destinations.

“Effective April 20, we are reducing our flights—2 to Kalibo and 42 to Caticlan—to just nine weekly flights to Kalibo and seven weekly flights to Caticlan,” said PAL’s Jessica Abaya. “But what we are doing is we are adding flights to other destinations. Flights to Bacolod, Iloilo, Cebu and Puerto Princesa effective April 20. Soon after that, we will be adding flights from Cebu to Busuanga, Clark to Cebu, Clark to Busuanga, and even flights from Manila to Dumaguete and Manila to Cagayan de Oro,” she added.

Two lawmakers, meanwhile, urged the Department of Tourism to launch an aggressive information drive to promote other tourists destinations.

Reps. Ben Evardone of Eastern Samar and Raneo Abu of Batangas said they expect the Tourism Department to find ways to promote other tourist attractions to address the expected losses as a result of a shutdown to clean the world-famous tourist destination.

“With about 700,000 cancellations of foreign tourist arrivals in Boracay, I am calling on the DoT to aggressively market and promote alternative destinations in our country,” said Evardone, chairman of the House committee on banks and financial intermediaries.

Also on Friday, Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu said there were many other places to set up a casino and resort complex that was approved for Boracay next year.

Cimatu and Leones said they were caught off guard by reports that plans to build a 230-hectare casino on the island have been approved.

The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. has granted a provisional license for the casino owned by Macao-based Galaxy Entertainment and its Filipino partner, Leisure and Resorts World Corp. 

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