The Department of Tourism has a chronic problem, and it is not funding, slogans, or even global headwinds.
It is leadership fit.
For decades, we have treated the Department of Tourism as a showcase post rather than a command post. A place for visibility, not velocity. A role defined by branding instincts when what the sector desperately needs is operational nerve.
Tourism today is not a mood. It is a machine.
And machines do not run on good intentions.
Every time Philippine tourism falls behind its neighbors, the same excuses surface. We are still recovering. We are unique. We are island-heavy. We are resilient. These are not explanations. They are alibis. Other countries faced the same pandemic, the same inflation, and the same geopolitical shocks and still managed to move faster, reopen smarter, and compete harder.
The difference was not assets. It was seriousness.
In successful tourism economies, the tourism minister is not a cheerleader. He or she is a systems operator. Someone who understands that tourism begins long before a traveler sees a beach photo and ends long after the Instagram post fades. It starts with air rights and ends with repeat visits. It lives in visa rules, airport capacity, pricing discipline, infrastructure readiness, environmental enforcement, and crisis response.
In the Philippines, we still confuse promotion with performance.
We appoint leaders who speak fluently about branding but struggle with aviation economics. Who celebrate arrivals but cannot influence connectivity. Who talk sustainability but hesitate to impose limits. Who manage perceptions but not systems.
Tourism is one of the few sectors where failure is cumulative. Every delayed flight, every overpriced domestic leg, every congested airport, and every inconsistent policy compounds into lost confidence. Tourists do not write op-eds. They simply choose somewhere else next time.
Yet leadership appointments continue to signal that we think tourism is soft power rather than hard economics.
The uncomfortable truth is this: the DoT should never be run by someone whose primary strength is messaging. Messaging follows structure. It does not replace it. A tourism secretary must be comfortable fighting inter-agency battles, forcing alignment across transport, immigration, environment, trade, and local governments. If the secretary cannot impose coordination, the system defaults to inertia.
What Philippine tourism needs is not another storyteller. It needs a builder.
Someone who has run complex operations. Someone who understands routes, slots, congestion, and cost structures. Someone who sees tourism not as a poster campaign but as a national supply chain of experiences.
We also need to stop pretending that sustainability is a talking point. Sustainability is governance. It means saying no to overdevelopment. It means enforcing carrying capacities even when local politicians complain. It means accepting fewer tourists today to protect value tomorrow. That requires political spine, not popularity.
And perhaps most critically, the DoT needs a leader who understands crisis as a permanent condition, not a temporary disruption. Pandemics, climate events, geopolitical shocks, and security scares are no longer black swans. They are the operating environment. Tourism leadership without crisis muscle is a liability.
The reason our neighbors are pulling ahead is not because they love tourism more. It is because they govern it better. They appoint leaders who treat tourism as an economic engine that demands discipline, speed, and coherence.
Until we do the same, Philippine tourism will remain trapped in a familiar loop: strong branding, weak delivery; beautiful destinations, frustrating access; big promises, modest results.
This is not about blaming individuals. It is about ending a mindset.
Tourism is too important to be ceremonial. Too valuable to be experimental. Too competitive to be sentimental.
If we keep appointing leaders for who they are rather than what the job structurally requires, we should stop asking why we are lagging.
The answer will already be sitting at the top.
