Chinese tourists coming during Legazpi’s Ibalong Festival By Danny O. Calleja LEGAZPI CITY, Aug. 7 (PNA) – A series of Cebu Pacific chartered direct flights will be flying in here hundreds of Chinese tourists from Xiamen City, China, as the city celebrates the Ibalong Festival. The first flight is scheduled to arrive Friday, Aug. 8, carrying 165 passengers who will stay for four days and three nights. All of them will be billeted at the Misibis Bay Resort and Casino in the nearby Sto. Domingo, Albay. Misibis Bay is a posh resort hotel considered as a private tropical hideaway built on a pristine stretch of beach serving as a luxury island playground along Cagraray Island where Albay’s hospitality abounds. At least two other flights, which will arrive on Aug. 11 and 16, are also scheduled -- each carrying the same number of passengers, city Mayor Noel Rosal announced in a press conference here Thursday. These Chinese tourists will be in the city in time for the celebration of the Ibalong Festival, a yearly non-religious fiesta depicting Bicol’s early beginnings based on the Ibalong Epic written by the late Prof. Merito Espinas that tells of mythical super heroes, villains, monsters and wild animals in the ancient times. “This is the longest running tourism promotion-related festival in the Bicol region that expresses warmth and goodwill to all people and encourages visitors and tourists to celebrate with the Legazpeños,” Rosal said. The festival’s formal opening will be on Aug. 16 but preliminary activities -- like the screening of candidates for the Mutya ng Ibalong beauty pageant, which was held last Aug. 3, the kick-off of the Mt. Mayon Triathlon on Aug. 10 and opening of the 2nd Ibalong National Women’s Beach Volleyball Championship on Aug. 15-17 – will serve as advance activities. The festivities -- loaded with events that will offer fun, exciting adventures and lot of surprises -- will run until Aug, 3. These events will be an added entertainment to the Chinese tourists who are very much attracted to Mt. Mayon and going around lava fronts around its foot on board all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), Stephen Chen of the China International Travel Service (CITS) said during the same press conference. “During their stays, these Chinese tourists will enjoy the overflowing of celebrations in this prime tourist destination known in the whole travel industry world as the City of Fun and Adventure,” Rosal said. This Xiamen-Legazpi direct chartered flight project was arranged with Cebu Pacific and CITS by the city government under Rosal in partnership with the management of Misibis Bay headed by business tycoon Elizalde Co. Initially, these series of chartered flights from Xiamen will go on until October this year with four flights a week but “we are working on an arrangement with Cebu Pacific and the CITS to extend it up to the end of this year,” Misisbis Bay general manager Ian Mayer Varona said. “Hopefully, next year and onward, we would be able to arrange a year-round direct flights program with the Legazpi Domestic Airport as the gateway while we are awaiting for the completion of the Southern Luzon International Airport (SLIA) now ongoing construction in the nearby Daraga town,” Rosal said. This new airport, which has been placed by the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) as a priority project intended to boost Bicol’s booming tourism industry, is scheduled to be completed and put into operations before the end of the term of Pres. Benigno Aquino III on 2016. The opening of the Legazpi Airport as gateway for direct international flights came last January with the coming in of the maiden chartered flight of Philippine Airlines with 156 Chinese tourists on board from Xiamen. It was first arranged by the provincial government of Albay under Gov. Joey Salceda with local and China-based travel agencies as a program in line with the Aquino administration’s policy to achieve inclusive growth through tourism that will have direct impact to the community. Rosal said having Legazpi as the newest direct destination for the Chinese travel market means getting them into a yearly cycle wherein they will be coming via chartered flights in a frequency of twice a week. Each of these tourists spends between US$ 500 and US$ 1,000 a day and with the coming of 230 weekly would mean as much as US$ 230,000 weekly tourism receipts for the city and some parts of Albay where they would be buying souvenir items and buy foods, among other expenditures, he said. Tourism will definitely take a crucial role in the city, the province of Albay, the Bicol region and the country’s pursuit for inclusive and horizontal growth that will benefit not only big investors such as hotel operators but also the people in the countryside, where most of the tourist destinations are located, by providing more opportunities for employment and business ventures, the city mayor said. “The opening of the city as gateway for direct international flights takes advantage of the foreign market trend showing that international tourists do not tend to a local destination as they follow a cycle leading them from one place to another,” he added. Parallel with these developments, what the city government is doing is improve its capacity to accommodate more tourists taking into consideration that the city is also fast emerging as one of the country’s convention capitals. “We are now hosting an average of 20 big conventions and similar occasions yearly, bringing in to the city around 60,000 visitors each year. So far, we only have 2,009 hotel rooms that can accommodate in one occasion some 5,000 people,” Rosal said. More accommodation facilities are needed, that is why the city government has been encouraging and attracting more investors to venture into this endeavor and the responds are very encouraging, he added. (PNA)
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 02:30:43 +0000
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