Being in the Department of Tourism (DOT) should not just be having photo-ops in tourist spots, or just delivering motherhood statements on tourism. It should mean going down to the ground, identifying problems and introducing measures or improvements so tourists will keep coming back again and again, with new other faces every time like friends and relatives.
One big problem as cited in last week’s issue of this paper is the lack of tourist grade restaurants and comfort rooms along the way to tourist destinations. A good example would be the Halsema Highway which one has to take if coming from Baguio City going to Sagada and other destinations beyond such as Banaue or Kalinga.
It is not meant here for the DOT to start operating restaurants and hotels for it had proved itself to be a humongous failure in this respect. Take Mount Data Hotel which it had been operating for almost half a century. It had been a losing venture all throughout. The DOT is a government agency after all with all the incompetence and inefficiency.
For the establishment of very good restaurants along the Halsema Highway, for instance, the DOT can help private entrepreneurs to get into such ventures by marshalling government resources to come to their aid. Take capital requirements, what are government banks doing? They are wasting their money to unworthy government ventures that often amount to nothing. Of late, the Land Bank had been lending money to Local Government Units for the financing of their projects. These usually, however, result in grossly substandard projects or even ghost projects. We are talking here of hundreds of millions of pesos of government money. What did we expect if most of the funds lent out went to the pockets of politicians—and some of these were shared with Land Bank executives who worked out the loans.
Perhaps the DOT can convince the Land Bank or the DBP to lend out to private entrepreneurs willing to venture into tourist oriented businesses with all the safeguards such as collaterals, etc. For example, the collaterals can be the land to be acquired for a nice sprawling upscale restaurant in Buguias, Benguet and the improvements to be introduced thereon. The repayment program should be easy on the investor to make the project sustainable. As to the financial requirements, it would be just in the tens of millions of pesos which would be nothing compared to what the Land Bank had been lending to LGUs which did not redound to the benefit of the people who had to pay for the loans through their LGU’s internal revenue allotments.
As to the DBP, it also had been lending billions of pesos to finance big projects, mostly of the cronies of the politicians in power. And most of these were never paid back.
There are so many tourist oriented projects that can be thought of but the question is, will the DOT be daring and competent enough?**