With an increase of 18.1% from 2004’s 182,904 warm bodies to this year’s 215,929, the Department of Tourism (DOT)’s enduring efforts has once again paid off as official figures from the DOT Statistics Division of visitor arrivals for May have shown.

Tourism Secretary Joseph Ace Durano enthusiastically shared, “The results are truly encouraging, and these numbers are very motivating for us to continue and further intensify our campaigns for Philippine tourism.”

Top priority markets such as the United States, Korea, and Japan provided great results, as projected. From last year’s 43,097, the United States’ tourist numbers improved to 49,929 or 16.0% growth rate.

Korean tourist arrivals, on the other hand, got bigger by 27.8%, registering 37,510 this year from 2004’s 29,353 visitors. Japan’s statistics also grew to 2005’s 30,467 as compared to its 27,984 of the same period last year, garnering an increase of 8.9%.

Other countries that are included in the list of Philippines’ top source of foreign travelers for May are Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, Singapore, United Kingdom, Germany, and Malaysia.

Durano further explained, “Most of our marketing promotions are concentrated on these markets and the DOT has already laid out and continuously executed market-specific sub-campaigns to expand our operations in these areas. We are optimistic that these statistics will still escalate in the coming months.”

Keeping up with the success of the previous month, an increase of 15.3% from last year has already been established for mid-June. This is based on the recent unofficial numbers from the NAIA daily visitor arrivals, which actually comprises 85% of the official figures.

Again, the United States, Korea and Japan topped the list of Philippines’ leading sources of foreign visitors, respectively garnering 23.78%, 15.68%, and 15.64% of the total percentage of tourist arrivals. Moreover, China has been consistently recording exceptional upsurge after garnering a huge growth rate of 211.2% for May 2005 and a whopping 433.05% improvement for mid-June of this year from the same period last 2004.

“The DOT has already organized marketing plans for the rest of the year. We will continue to carry out these campaigns, and inject new and innovative approaches to make our marketing strategies even more effective. We are hoping that we can sustain this so that we would be able to reach our targets for 2005,” ended Secretary Durano.