Source::AP
After two years of strict government travel regulations and laws in the Philippines, now finally foreign visitors can enter the Southeast Asian country after the government lifted the ban on foreign travellers.
Now, tourists from 157 countries with visa-free arrangements with the Philippines who have been fully vaccinated and tested negative will be welcomed back without any quarantine measures on arrival. The government have also done away with border closure against whole countries classification and have gone more with traveller by traveller basis.
With about one million Filipinos losing their jobs in the travel and tourism industry in the first year of the pandemic alone, this has been a lifesaver for those battered sectors. Tourism destinations including popular beach and tropical resorts resembled ghost towns. Further typhoons and volcanic eruptions further caused tourism to drop in the area.
The reopening had been for Dec 1 but due to the new variant, Omicron had to be delayed. With more than 60 million of the 110 Filipinos vaccinated and the Christmas holidays seeing less than a thousand daily cases, the situation was easing. While there was a record high of 39,000 cases a day in mid-January, with the situation easing in the country, the government had decided to open the country to a foreign country.
