Two bills have been drawn up at the House of Representatives—the Philippine Sustainable Tourism Act which was approved at the committee level, and the creation of a Tourism Resiliency Certification Programme (TRCP), which has been endorsed for plenary approval.
Tourism stakeholders called the Boracay island closure for environmental reasons a wake-up call; Philippine Congress heard it, and it’s slowly doing something about it.
Two bills have been drawn up at the House of Representatives—the Philippine Sustainable Tourism Act which was approved at the committee level, and the creation of a Tourism Resiliency Certification Programme (TRCP), which has been endorsed for plenary approval.
The TRCP is a programme that will identify risks to the country’s tourism industry; prescribes compliance measures; establishes an appropriate metric system to determine certain acceptable levels of compliance; and mandates the compliance of prescribed measures by all registered tourism enterprises.
The bill calls for the creation of the Philippine Tourism Risk Assessment Framework to be conducted by a qualified international consulting agency, under the supervision of the Department of Tourism (DOT).
The Sustainable Tourism Act is a “paradigm shift from our old ways of doing business in the tourism industry”, House tourism committee chairman Lucy Gomez said in the bill’s explanatory note.
The measure creates a Philippine Sustainable Tourism Council that would be convened by Gomez’s committee, and would have the responsibility of achieving and maintaining “sustainable tourism”.
The proposed council is tasked with integrating all existing laws pertaining to the tourism industry in various areas that influence sustainability and create needed policies and regulations to achieve sustainable tourism.
The measures are seen as an initiative to define legislative recourse to many issues and problems caused by, or facing the tourism industry.
But congressional researchers said the immediate challenge is fine-tuning the implementation of the measures once they are approved and signed into law, and how the bills can be harmonised with the National Tourism Act of 2009, which reorganised the DOT organisation.