ScubaMagazine.net Publisher in the News
Diving to keep RP tourism afloat
By Cheche Moral
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 05:45:00 11/23/2008
MANILA, Philippines - It’s like owning a Ferrari and never driving it.
That’s how Dave Allen likened the majority of Filipinos who don’t scuba-dive. Allen is an American marine videographer and president and publisher of www.ScubaMagazine.net, an online forum for the international diving community. He has taken a special interest in the Philippine dive sites since his first visit three years ago.
“Do you realize that you’re in paradise and you’ve never been able to experience what Americans and Europeans will pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of going to see?” he asked rhetorically at the Dema (Diving Equipment and Marketing Association) Show 2008 held recently at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Nevada, USA.
Allen is just one of 6.9 million scuba divers in North America whom the Philippine Department of Tourism (DOT) hopes will buoy the country’s tourism industry through the global economic crisis.
The DOT bolstered its bid with its biggest participation yet in the Dema this year, targeting one of the “least affected” markets, according to Mary Anne Cuevas, Philippine tourism attaché in the US Southwestern State and Latin America.
Recession-proof
Diving is one of the DOT’s so-called “special-interest” markets, which it believes to be “recession-proof.” (Others are the adventure sport, wellness and medical tourism markets). Meaning, divers may not go as often but will go at least once a year.
“Let’s say there are 6.9 million divers and 20 percent is wiped out,” cited Vernie Velarde-Morales, Philippine tourism attaché in the US’ and Canada’s Midwest Regions. “But there’s still over 5 million. If we target one percent of that, that’s 50,000. That’s big.”
Lynn Funkhouser, a veteran underwater photographer based in Chicago who comes to dive in the Philippines for at least two months every year since 1976, shared that opinion.
“It’s pretty scary. I’ve never lived through anything like it,” she said of the US economy. “But you always have people wealthy enough to travel and they will go. And those of us who have to save and scrimp may not be able to go as often, but the moment we have two nickels, we’ll go.”
Funkhouser, a former flight attendant who found herself in the country for the first time on a side trip at the height of martial law, now calls the Philippines her second home.
“If I couldn’t go, I’d feel deprived,” she said. “It’s like diving on LSD: It’s out of this world!”
Coral Triangle
She also operates dive travels to the country, and speaks at dive shows promoting Philippine dive sites titled “Simply the Best.”
“Well, it’s the best,” she said emphatically. The Philippines is right smack at the center of the “coral triangle,” the most biologically diverse marine environment, according to the industry rag Scuba Diving. On the borders are Bali, Indonesia; the Solomon Islands and parts of Malaysia; Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste.
“You have 2,500 species of fish,” Funkhouser said. “Australia has 1,500. Who cares?”
A subspecies of soapfish that has eluded her for decades she found only in Philippine waters.
Funkhouser, who was on a boat that was fired on while on a medical mission during the Marcos years, pooh-poohed US travel advisories against the country.
“It has nothing to do with safety,” she said. “It has everything to do with what we want to put economic sanctions on...When Saddam was chucking scuds in Israel, the Philippines was in the travel advisory, but not Israel, and there was no war going on in the Philippines.”
“The average American is safer in Davao than in LA,” Allen, a Los Angeles native, also said.
Funkhouser’s fliers underscore that there’s “No malaria!” in the country, contradicting a claim of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I’ve talked to professors...There’s none, except for a small corner of Palawan, which I’m not going to if not via helicopter. I don’t listen to the State Department. I’ve gone there and I know it’s wonderful.”
Security queries
Cesario Calanoc III, a former ABS-CBN Star Circle talent named JR Herrera and now president of Activentures, a dive and golf travel firm based in San Francisco with its own resort in Anilao, Batangas, says this is the first time there were no queries on security.
“We say it’s safe. Next question.”
“In Europe we never hear that,” noted the Connecticut-based Mercy Agudo, VP of Marco Vincent Dive Resort in Puerto Galera. “But here we used to.”
“I’m not so bothered with the travel advisory because it’s always been there,” said Emma Ruth Yulo, the tourism attaché based in New York. “What’s important is the personal experience,” she added, referring to random incidents of theft and whatnot. “There’s no cohesive tourism awareness in the country...Isa lang ang mabiktima and [word] gets around... Isang e-mail lang.”
Allen said what has been dismaying is that Philippine resorts and some government entities don’t respond to e-mail inquiries—or take forever to do so. “In the Philippines, they expect us to text them. But that’s not what we do in the US.”
This year his group brought in 15 divers and sent e-mail inquiries to 14 resorts. Only three replied and it took them two weeks. Allen’s video was aired on GMA-7, making it a “publicity heaven for the resort that responded.”
“When the Philippines is awake, the US is asleep. We won’t get up at 3 a.m. to make an expensive call,” he said.
“The good thing with the present leadership in tourism,” said Velarde-Morales of Secretary Joseph “Ace” Durano’s administration, “is that there’s a better appreciation of the realistic needs of our country. The approach now is niche-market segments.” Velarde-Morales has been in government service for 32 years.
Giveaways
The DOT’s programs to attract the North American market was strengthened with a 250-airline-ticket giveaway three years ago, which created the 84,000-name database for the department. It continues to rely on this database during low season, where travel agents sell their discounted packages, said DOT Team North America head Corazon Jorda-Apo.
Last year, it raffled off a fully furnished condo unit in St. Francis Square to actual arriving tourists who participated in an online contest.
Recently, it launched the Travel Mall, where travel agents in the US can upload and sell their tour packages on www.experiencephilippines.ph.
The DOT has also been training US travel agents online on selling the Philippines as a destination. It has so far graduated 1,000 agents, with 150 of them invited to the country to experience its offerings.
It’s also eyeing Canada as a possible growth market. “There’s been a double-digit growth in the last three to four years,” said Rene de los Santos, tourism attaché for Northwestern US and Western Canada. “Even with the financial difficulty in the US, we believe Canada will still grow next year.”
In his online forum which has some 3,200 members, Allen said it’s a consensus that the Philippines “represents the best dive destination value in the world.”
“We’re not here short-term,” said Mel Agudo, CEO and president of Marco Vincent Dive Resort. “We’re investing long-term. Whatever happens with the economy, they [the divers] will be there. The Philippines will be there.”
ScubaMagazine.net Publisher in the Philippine News Again
Philippine Star
Deep-sea diving & cyber surfing
By Tanya T. Lara November 09, 2008
One thing about Americans is that they love the Internet and they get in touch with someone from across the globe by e-mail. You can’t expect them to text you or to wake up in the middle of the night in California to make an expensive telephone call just so they can catch you during your working hours in Manila.
So when Dave Allen — a diver, underwater videographer, blogger and writer for ScubaMagazine.net — was about to bring to the Philippines a group of 15 divers, he e-mailed 14 different resorts in the Philippines to inquire about packages.
Not one of them responded for two weeks.
Only three resorts e-mailed back later — and one of them was on an island where there was no Internet. Finally, Planet Dive in Anilao responded and as a result got the business and free publicity. Dave had traveled with the group and with a GMA-7 film crew from the show Born to Be Wild.
Dave shoots high-definition videos and uploads them on about 50 file-sharing sites, which spreads to about a hundred in a year. He says that for divers, videos are very important because they want to see the marine life as it is now — not what it was 30 years ago like, say, on a resort’s website photos.
Dave is also part of the Philippine Paradise Divers Group, a community that’s also on facebook.com. A former quality control manager for aerospace, he now shoots and produces high-def videos for dive sites around the world for a living. But for the Philippines and its resorts, “I do not charge anything. It’s my way of giving back to them. The Philippines has been a good friend and ally to the US and I hope the US is a good friend in return.”
As a diver, he says he has gotten so much from the country. “There’s a fascinating discovery at every dive. I get excited about running across little strange animals. When I was in Escaya Resort in Panglao, I ran into two small decorator crabs — it was amazing.”
Dive videos, he says, are viewed tens of thousands of times on the Internet and he qualifies that “views” are much better than “hits.”
In this age of blogging and countries without boundaries, Team North America has gotten on with the times as well. Two years ago, they acquired a massive database of Filipino Americans when they launched the website www.experience philippines.ph with a promotion that gave away 250 roundtrip tickets from the US to the Philippines. Last year, they gave away a P5 million condo unit at St. Francis Tower in the Shangri-La Plaza complex on EDSA (a Fil-Canadian won it). They also have a 24-hour number that North Americans can call and it is manned by tour guides in the Philippines.
“This year we are concentrating on the selling part,” says Team North America head Junjun Jorda-Apo. “We’ve advertised on Yahoo as well — a 30-second video ad on diving and another one on wellness.”
They also selected 1,300 travel agents in the US to undergo online training about the Philippines so they can sell the country better. About 150 select agents, those with the biggest potential to sell, were sent on fam tours around the country.
It seems that the best way to catch these people who are so passionate about being underwater is in cyberspace.
