tourist spots in the philippines essay
Hello bro I wish you in good condition, Today me want to share information about tourist spots in the philippines essay complete with images and contents. But before jumping to content tourist spots in the philippines essay it would be good we understand about the tourist spots in the philippines essay.
tourist spots in the philippines essay is quite selling wanted right now, especially tourist spots in the philippines essay which want I spread this is very full of content with more information. In era a lot of technology that is sosophisticated, starting from Smartphone which your have can do anything in the hands that your hold that. Want it looking for maps,tutorials,plants it's all in your cellphone.
Article this time are part of content which has many in the internet world that you hold . Of course the material that want I to share is very different from the other next blog, very complete and reliable.
Ok there's no need to wait any longer, let's go straight to the main discussion, Below information tourist spots in the philippines essay complete with images and contents.
CHAPTER 1 – THE PROBLEM
1.1 Introduction / Background of the Problem
INTRODUCTION
There are numerous testimonials from different international personalities that the Philippines is one of the most beautiful places on earth. The country truly has the capabilities to attract as many tourist as the government wants because of what the country can present to its visitors. The beaches, mountain trails, heritage sites and not to mention the Filipino cuisine is very inviting that foreigners keep coming back. The way these natural wonders and cultural sites leave tourists with lasting impressions proves that the “fun” is truly in the Philippines.
Tourism has grown in the Philippines so much that it is now the fourth highest government sector…show more content…The banner “It’s more fun in the Philippines” turn heads and had foreigners flock the country and gradually boost the tourism sector since 2011.
Among ASEAN countries the Philippines has posted the slowest growth rate since 2013 (Figure 1). The country is sixth in the region with a growth rate of 3.2% attracting 4.8 million inbound visitors. Although the country has been increasing its tourist arrivals since 2012, the number (increase) is slowly decelerating. The industry’s travel performance is attributed to the infrastructure gap that supports the tourism sector (Masigan, 2015).
In Central Luzon, the region has become one of the leading tourist destination of the country as it posted an increase in tourist arrivals of 3.1 million, an increase of 21% from 2013 (Table 1). Despite the increased tourist arrivals improved expressways and newly opened airport, the Department of Tourism – Region III still noted in their Planning your Tourism Product Workshop that lack of public transportation is a tourism development issues in the region (Tiotuico, 2015). Moreover as developments focuses more on Subic-Clark areas, increasing number of tourist arrivals are also recorded on low-attracting provinces that signals need for more transport services for travellers (Table
Tourism is recognized as an important industry in the Philippines. Its significance as main driver and contributor to socio-economic growth is acknowledged in Republic Act 9593 or the Tourism Policy Act of 2009. It has seen an increasing direct contribution to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and employment over the years and peaking in 2017 at 12.2% and 13.1%, respectively (Philippine Statistics Authority, 2018). Prior to the launch of the campaign, the Philippines was struggling to compete with its neighboring Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Singapore in terms of tourist volume (Bosangit, 2014). The Philippine Department of Tourism (DOT) developed the Philippine National Tourism Development Plan (NTDP) 2011-2016 that sought to address issues of the tourism industry, and aim achieve 10 million foreign tourist arrivals and 35 million domestic tourists by 2016.
With a national policy and plan at hand and an increasing importance to the economy, the Philippine government easily put tourism as one of its main priorities for development. Then-President Benigno Aquino III, approved a budget of 3.1 billion Philippine pesos to establish a tourism marketing campaign to reach the NTDP targets by 2016, the largest the Department received for marketing (Bosangit, 2014). The establishment of a new marketing campaign was opened for bidding to advertising agencies in the country that was eventually won by BBDO Guerrero, the Philippine chapter of one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, BBDO.
The winning campaign was called “It’s more fun in the Philippines” and was launched in January 2012. The Department of Tourism revealed an accompanying logo which included a pixelated weaved image of the Philippines with a color palette representing the three main colors of the Philippine flag (Figure 1). Simultaneous to the launch of the campaign was also the launch of the now-defunct website www.itsmorefuninthephilippines.com that showcased the different destinations and attractions around the country. One of the highlights of the campaign was crowdsourcing, where they encouraged people to create their own ads or memes that would showcase what makes the Philippines “more fun”.
Figure 1. It’s more fun in the Philippines official campaign logo. (Department of Tourism, 2012b)
At the onset of the campaign, DOT launched three sample memes to set as an example (Figure 2), along with the hashtag #ItsMoreFuninThePhilippines in all online posts relating to the campaign. DOT also launched an application and the guidelines for submission of memes on the website. With an estimated 27 million Facebook users at the time of the launch, the campaign became a viral hit online (Valdez, Tupas, & Carol Tan, 2017). Within 30 minutes of the launch, the hashtag was also trending on Twitter worldwide (Bosangit, 2014).
Figure 2. Sample image released by the Department of Tourism (Department of Tourism, 2012b)
Then-DOT Secretary Ramon Jimenez Jr. described the campaign as “grounded on basic, truthful communication between two persons; a campaign for people who haven’t seen the Philippines yet; with a new tourism line that allows the Filipinos to take the line and own it to themselves; and it is not a manufactured line; it is drawn from the way Filipinos have touched the lives of tourists” (Metro Manila Directions in Bosangit, 2014, p.151).
A year after the launch of the campaign, foreign visitor arrivals hit a 9.07% increase from the previous year, marking the first time that the country surpassed the 4 million mark (Bosangit, 2014). While no actual measurement has been done on the online success and impacts of the campaign, DOT perceived the continuous increase of tourist arrivals (Figure 3) as an indicator of the campaign’s success.
Figure 3. Foreign visitor arrivals in the Philippines from 2010-2016
(Compiled from: Department of Tourism, 2011, 2012a, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016)
However, while the campaign encouraged to generate “fun” things about the Philippines, DOT could not also stop people from generating memes that emulated negativity about the Philippines (Figure 4) (Della Corte & Sepe, 2016). After a year, the meme generator application was discontinued. However, people are still able to produce memes containing the official font, the Harabara Mais, that is available to download for free in several sites across the internet. This makes memes look like it was generated from the online application, despite its closure. Thousands of photos were and are still being generated online and continue to be searchable on the internet. Despite these negative photos being produced, the campaign continues to run in the present.
2.6. Retirement tourism in the Philippines
The Philippine Retirement Authority (PRA) is the mandated government agency to “develop and promote the Philippines as a retirement haven” (Philippine Retirement Authority, n.d.). The PRA only became an attached agency of the DOT upon the enactment of the Republic Act 9593. Their mission is to “provide a globally competitive retirement program in the Philippines for foreign nationals and former Filipinos” as part of the socio-economic development of the country (Philippine Retirement Authority, n.d.). The PRA enjoins DOT’s efforts in promoting their services in various fairs, sales missions, expositions and conferences in the Philippines and abroad (Philippine Retirement Authority, 2017).
Retirement tourism is identified as one of the core tourism products within the NTDP. According to the Plan, retirement tourism is “capable of delivering strong future growth with long average length of stay and expenditure” (Department of Tourism, 2012c, p. ix). The Plan identifies the European, Middle East, and North American markets as main targets for this tourism segment. Since the inception of PRA in 1985, it has seen increasing number of foreign retirees in the Philippines (Table 1) that mostly came from China, South Korea, India, United States of America, and Taiwan (Philippine Retirement Authority, 2017).
Table 1. Cumulative count of foreign retirees in the Philippines from 1985 to 2017.
Year Cumulative count
1985-2012 28,890
2013 32,697
2014 37,485
2015 42,516
2016 48,072
2017 53,933
Despite the PRA not being directly involved in the “It’s more fun in the Philippines” campaign, DOT produces material that are targeted towards retirees. In 2017, DOT launched a video entitled “Sights” that featured M. Uchimura, a Japanese retiree in different destinations in the Philippines (available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3xeB4-qv8I). At the end of the video, it was revealed he was not only a retiree, but also a blind man. It was met with criticism online leading to DOT pulling out the commercial following claims around social media that it was strikingly similar to a South African tourism ad (Rappler.com, 2017). However, during the earlier stages of the campaign, only images with older adults as subjects were produced from the campaign and did not necessarily aim to attract older adults to retire in the country. Nevertheless, these photographs contribute to the images and perceptions of the Philippines as a retirement destination.
3. Theoretical Framework
Like DOT, many destination marketing or management organizations (DMOs) use photographs to represent and promote destinations and attractions. Photographs play a crucial role in promoting destinations as they set expectations of quality and experience (Garrod, 2009). Images that are portrayed and actual experience could determine tourist satisfaction and possibilities of recommending to others and returning back (Britton, 1979; Fakeye & Crompton, 1991; Garrod, 2009; Tuohino & Pitkänen, 2004).
Choosing images to represent destinations and projecting how they will be received and perceived prove to be a difficult endeavor for researchers and DMOs alike owing to multiple social realities and even more complex feedback loops among multiple senders and receivers (Blichfeldt, 2018; Crick, 1985; Garrod, 2009; Hunter, 2008; Jenkins, 2003). In the advent of social media, actors and stakeholders are better able to communicate to and with amongst themselves, producing complex interactions than ever before that stimulate experiences, images, and even satisfaction rates (Oliveira & Panyik, 2015). Visual representations help build a destination image that has been referred to as both the actual image represented and possible metaphorical implications of the image and are subject to a wide range of interpretations by different tourism stakeholders (Beerli & Martin, 2004; Edwards, 1996). In this view, photographic representations of tourism destinations has three directions of inquiry: the extrinsic direction which looks into the difference between representation and reality, the intrinsic direction which deals with the message and the style of the image itself, and the dynamic direction which focuses on the ability of the image to influence perception, lens, and experience of a place (McGregor, 2000).
As such, photographic representations of tourism destinations have “multiple signifiers for the endless purposes of various combinations of senders and receivers” that contribute to the complexity of a destination image in itself (Hunter, 2008, p. 356). These representations and interpretations can evolve through time, through a process called resemiotization. It deals with “how meaning-making shifts from context to context, from practice to practice, or from one stage of a practice to the next” (Iedema, 2003, p. 41). That is to say, representations and meanings are subject to different interpretations as it is communicated in varying contexts and through different media. The translation of meanings within different contexts is affected by the various social realities, and might be eventually detached from its original intentions (Mehan, 1993).
Scollon (2008, p. 233) explains that these meaning-making alterations are “always mediated by the actions of social actors as well as through material objects of the world”. He describes nine processes of resemiotization which he labels as discourse itineraries – action, practice, narrative, authorization, certification, metonymization, remodalization, materialization, technologization or reification. As an example, he took the word “organic” and described the complex transformation of meanings and definitions associated with it as a result of the actions, brands, and history coming along with it. He mentioned that organic can refer to the actions and practices of farming, or to the lifestyle, to an operational definition by a national entity, to certified products, or even the narrative of a brand. This way, he illustrates how meanings sought in language, texts, photographs, and other media are inevitably a result of past actions and experiences and can even anticipate future outcomes.
With co-creation as the underlying concept in the “It’s more fun in the Philippines” campaign, it involved various actors and stakeholders that not only created content, but also selected, authorized, and disseminated. Analyzing representations of the Philippines within this campaign and how their meanings are transformed across different stakeholders and contexts allows a good grasp of “the developer’s intentions, the consumers’ interpretations and the interactions among them” (Herbert, 2001, p. 317).
4. Methodology
Milner (2012, p. 11) describes memes as “multimodal artifacts where image and text are integrated to tell a joke, make an observation, or advance an argument”. Internet users can create, recreate, produce and reproduce different variations of one image which allows it to be a “quintessential participatory artefact” that is “open, collaborative, and adaptable” (Milner, 2012, p. 12). Huntington (2013, p. 1) argues that internet memes are “a form of representational discourse that subverts dominant media messages to create new meaning”. As such, analyzing memes “requires an understanding of representational conventions associated with specific groups or individuals” (Milner, 2012, p. 90).
These representations are best understood by taking a constructivist approach as it takes into account that interpretations are “not constructed in isolation, but against a backdrop of shared understandings, practices, language, and so forth” (Schwandt, 2003, p. 197). With co-creation behind the “It’s more fun in the Philippines” campaign, the outcomes reflect different contextual situations produced by different worldviews, experiences, and realities experienced by the different actors and stakeholders. Taking a constructivist paradigm for this study allows the researchers to delve into materials constructed by the different actors and stakeholders who took part in the campaign.
Hall (1997) notes two approaches to analyzing different representations that are exemplified in memes—semiotics and discursive approach. Semiotics, as an interdisciplinary study of signs, is rooted in “how meanings are made and how reality is represented (and indeed constructed) through signs” (Chandler, 2018, p. 2). Signs may refer to images, verbal language, texts, and other media of communication that can symbolize parcels of realities, worldviews, and perceptions (Jensen, 2015). Chandler (2018) further explains that signs play a mediating role in constructing social realities and as such, it is through these signs that perceptions and realities are expressed.
On the other hand, discourse analysis deals with language-in-use or how “meaning is constructed and interpreted” in different settings through the written and spoken language (Bhatia, Flowerdew, & Jones, 2008, p. 1). However, the digital world has now more than ever enabled people to communicate beyond the written and spoken language. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) argues that textual information is not necessarily at the essence of constructing meanings. Iedema (2003, p. 33) emphasizes further that the “blurring of boundaries among different semiotic dimensions of representations” needs to bring about a multimodal approach to discourse to better understand the interplay of signs across multiple modes of communication. This multimodal approach allows the researchers to delve both into the semiotics and language-in-use”.
The memes selected for analysis contain images of older adults and are mainly categorized into memes released by DOT and those that are generated by internet users. Memes released by DOT are taken from the official Facebook page of the DOT (www.facebook.com/ DepartmentOfTourism) and the official Facebook page of the campaign (www.facebook.com/itsmorefuninthephilippines) that DOT also handles. On the other hand, internet user-generated memes were scoured on Google Images using keywords “It’s more fun in the Philippines” combined with words such as “aging”, “old age”, “old people”, and “growing old” to extract memes that have older adults as subjects or are relating to older adults. The original link of the photo is also followed if still available and contextualized to the post when applicable.
In addition, the memes must also follow the guidelines released by DOT. This should include a word or a phrase that describes the image followed by the phrase “More fun in the Philippines”. The font used must be Harabara Mais and divided into two lines with only the word “Philippines” in the second line (Department of Tourism, 2012b). However, some of the memes released by DOT remain undisclosed whether they are produced by DOT or by internet users. A total of 6 memes are analyzed, where 3 are released by DOT and 3 are searched from Google Images.
The memes are analyzed in three parts: the image, the accompanying text, and the relationships between the two. The images are broken down to its subject and stylistic conventions to capture how older adults are portrayed visually in the memes. The accompanying texts are then explained as to the references made in the image. The relationships are then analyzed by describing the context and underlying discourses.
There are already several tourists who proclaims that it is more fun here in the Philippines. Have you been wondering why? Well maybe you’re wondering why because you haven’t been here. Well, to answer all your questions, I will state some facts here in my paper about why is it More Fun in the Philippines. I sincerely hope that you’ll enjoy reading this and hopefully, i will be able to satisfy your curiosity.
First, There are so many beautiful places here in the Philippines like Luneta Park, Burnham Park, Puerto Prinsesa, Boracay, and etc. You will really enjoy viewing the scenery. I assure you that you will really appreciate everything that you will see here.
Even though we are burdened by problems, you wouldn’t notice it for we always laugh like we don’t have a care in the world. We are also known as hospitable and friendly. Whether you’re a tourist or a fellow Filipino, we’ll surely welcome you warmly here in the Philippines.
OK, appropriate isn't the article?. Hopefully with topic about tourist spots in the philippines essay this, the viewers the problem can be resolved and entertained thanks to content this.
All of I, Hopefully content about tourist spots in the philippines essay those can be useful for all of you you. End word. See a for everything.