Around 1.5 million in total arrivals are expected during the last month of the year due to the aggressive tourism campaigns of the government, the Bureau of Immigration (BI) said on Monday.

This as travel trends show a major increase in travelers in 2023, Commissioner Norman Tansingco said in a statement.

Tansingco said that by the second quarter of 2023, the bureau has started recording around 1 million arrivals per month, which is far from the less than 100,000 arrivals per month during the height of the pandemic.

He said the agency recorded a total of 1,160,699 arriving passengers in November, almost half of which are foreign nationals.

Tansingco attributed the increasing number of arrivals to “aggressive tourism campaigns of the government.”

For 2023, the total number of arriving passengers for the entire year is already 79 percent higher than in 2022.

Tansingco further said Filipino outbound tourism has also bounced back.

In November, the BI recorded almost 1.1 million departures, close to the 1.3 million recorded in November 2019.

Meanwhile, Tansingco said they have beefed up their manpower, and have deployed augmentation teams and mobile counters to ensure smooth operations during the holiday season. (PNA)