The Philippines' economy and tourism has taken a tremendous hit since the Covid-19 pandemic started, just like majority of the world. Many countries have introduced travel bubbles to try and stimulate some tourism and get the economy going.
What is a travel bubble?
A travel bubble is when a country makes an agreement with other countries to allow tourist or businessmen with low Coronavirus cases to visit certain destinations.
A couple examples of possible candidate countries for the Philippine travel bubble could be Vietnam with ZERO deaths from the Coronavirus and New Zealand who has less than 3 new cases a day. Australia was an early target as well, although it has slowly gotten a spike of new cases the past week.
The problem
Many countries in Europe and in Asia have already started with their travel bubble with Thailand's department of tourism already rolling out promotional campaigns and videos to get tourists back in the country. For a travel bubble to be achieved, both countries has to have an agreement to let travelers cross from one country to another. Sure we'd like to have tourist come in, but would they actually want to come with the amount of cases the Philippines has?
The Philippines has 51,754 cases as of time of writing with more than a thousand fresh cases everyday. Add that with the fact that mass testing has not been properly implemented in the country then you probably get the picture on how bad it is here.
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With the Philippines having the second most highest cases of the Coronavirus in SouthEast Asia, next to only Indonesia, its doubtful other countries would agree to be part of our travel bubble in the next couple of months.
The Philippines has to show other countries that we have the virus under control to ever get a chance at the travel bubble scheme. So far domestic flights have been very limited and very low in demand. Cebu Pacific only flew a total of 550 passengers domestically for the month of June, which is insanely low and international flights still on hold.
Don't expect to see non-essential travel to be back soon in the country at this rate.
Despite the bleak situation we are all in, let's all do our part by always practicing social distancing whenever we are out, wearing our face masks, staying home when we can and helping those in need.
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