Alumni in the tourism business might find this interesting:
Philippine tourism’s Ace deals his cards
Lito Gutierrez, Jan 12, 2005
http://www.philippinenews.com/news/view_ar...284fd66a1862fe2
THE PHILIPPINE Department of Tourism is finally mounting a more aggressive campaign to attract Filipinos in America to include the homeland in their priority list of holiday destinations.
A draft of the campaign obtained by Philippine News showed a breakdown of the 2005 campaign including paid advertising in Filipino American media, trade and consumer promotions, media familiarization trips and intensive market research.
Tourism officials in the past tried to sell the Philippines by going on roadshows in the U.S. but spent their advertising and marketing budget on Asia and Europe.
This “putting-your-money-where-your-mouth-is” effort is a brainchild of Joseph “Ace” Durano, 34, a U.S. and Japanese-educated former three-term lawmaker from Cebu who took over the tourism portfolio from marketing whiz Robert “Obet” Pagdanganan last year.
Durano told PN in a recent interview that he had directed his marketing executives to divide the world into four geographical units and create individual marketing strategies for each. North America is one of the units.
The others were Asia, Australia and Europe.
“We need to be aggressive,” he said, “but we also need the right strategy.”
Philippine tourism officials have been criticized in certain FilAm sectors for ignoring the potential of the FilAm market. This was because FilAms were not considered a foreign market, according to these officials.
Preliminary DOT figures show a slight increase in visitor arrivals last year from the previous year’s 2.22 million.
Visitor arrivals from the U.S. topped the DOT’s figures with nearly 400,000 as of October last year, nearly 21 percent of all arrivals. A close second is Japan with about 320,000 arrivals, followed by Korea with slightly over 300,000.
The DOT, assuming that Filipinos in America would automatically choose the Philippines as a holiday destination, had instead put its advertising dollars in Asian and European markets using primarily the broadcast networks CNN and BBC.
The campaigns have succeeded in drawing Koreans, Chinese, Japanese and a smattering of European travelers. But they have failed in drumming up attraction to Philippine destinations among Filipinos in the U.S. Worse, issues of safety and political instability as raised in media have been a factor in FilAms’ decision to choose more secure holiday destinations.
With household incomes averaging over $65,000 a year, the FilAm community is an ethnic market that has been targeted by mainstream advertisers and marketers.
An indication of how much the Philippines was missing out on America as a market was when a FilAm group of San Francisco Bay Area travel agents, invited on a familiarization tour two years ago, asked why nobody had told them about the wonderful places they saw in the islands.
Durano, who went to high school in Santa Clara, Calif., is just about to change all that. And he is effecting this change not from a marketing perspective, but from one of a leader’s.
The position of tourism secretary, he said, “does not require a (marketing) technician. It requires political leadership.”
So when he speaks of “creating a demand,” he is not talking about “developing more products” because, as he put it, the Philippines has enough products.
What he said the industry needs is someone who can bring together all the entities in both the government and the private sector and synchronize their efforts toward attracting more travel traffic. He said he wanted the private tourism sector to take on a bigger role in bringing in more travelers.
In other words, the tourism secretary’s job, he said, is more like an orchestra conductor than a marketing expert.
This in the context of the tourism department makes sense because, as Durano pointed out, it is the smallest department, and therefore has the least amount of resources, in the Philippine bureaucracy.
Durano said the DOT is targeting an average of 30-percent increase in visitor arrivals annually, and is looking at about five million visitors by 2010.
Last year, tourism contributed about $2 billion to the national coffers.
Durano said he is aiming for $5 billion in the next five years.
In contrast, Singapore, which is smaller than just Manila, attracts some eight million visitors who spend more than $5 billion annually.
Not a few eyebrows were raised when President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo gave Durano, a prominent member of a powerful Visayan political dynasty, the tourism portfolio. It was felt that it was payback for Cebuanos who gave her the crucial votes she needed to win the last presidential elections.
His resumé, however, indicates that, as a congressman, tourism along with national security, education and infrastructure development, were his top concerns. On top of his law degree from the Ateneo de Manila, the wiry father of two has a bachelor’s degree in Asian Studies from the University of Redlands in Southern California and on Japan Studies from Japan’s prestigious Waseda University.