Acting Head of the National Tourism Administration (GNTA) Medea Janiashvili met with the newly appointed Ambassador of the Philippines to Georgia Maria Elena Algabre. The sides discussed possibilities of cooperation in the field of tourism and talked about the recovery of bilateral tourist flows and safe traffic in the post-pandemic period.
BM.GE inquired about Georgia's potential for tourism development with the Philippines. According to the official statistics of the Tourism Administration, in 2019, 24,749 visits were made from the Philippines to Georgia, which was 14.2% more compared to the previous year. The number of trips to Georgia from this direction has been increasing over the years (2016 - 14 950; 2017 - 19 100; 2018 - 21 673).
In 2020, due to the pandemic number of the visits dramatically decreased by 18,082 and the rate amounted to 6,667 annually. The decrease was 73.1%.
As for the data of January-August of this year, when the Georgian government opened the air borders and the summer season was active, 3,787 visits were made from the Philippines in 8 months, which was 43.1% down compared to the same period of the last year, and 75.8% less than 2019 data (2020 - 6 655 visits; 2019 - 15 663 visits).
The number of visits by international visitors to Georgia in January-August 2021 amounted to 961,757, which was 27.1% less than in the same period last year and 81.5% less than in the first eight months of 2019.
