Tourism in Metropolitan Manila - Philippines: An Analysis

Abstract

Tourism has become important for (mega)cities in Southeast Asia. Metropolitan Manila competes in the tourism market, but its tourism is scholarly unexplored so far. This Ph.D. thesis takes the approach, that urban tourism is a system comprising interacting stakeholders at the supply and consumer side, and visitor attractions. This dissertation analyses and characterizes Metropolitan Manila`s tourism system referring to its stakeholders, visitor attractions and services. Metropolitan Manila is able to tap the domestic and international tourism market with various attraction resources. But Metropolitan Manila`s supply-side stakeholder field appears highly diverse. The relations among these stakeholders can be characterized through discontinuous links, unequal participation, and non power-sharing. This adverse status is aggravated through the absence of tourism policy, obsolete tourism planning approaches and the dominance of top-down deciding political elites. Consequently, a consensual, goal-oriented acting is inhibited. Instead stakeholders act mutually exclusive or compete with each other. Tourism is predominately seen as a valuable economic tool. As a result, other important dimensions of tourism like socio-cultural, experiential, and infrastructural aspects are negated to a great extent. The current visitor is a short staying stop-over traveller who recognizes the capital`s built heritage as unique. Visitor activities and spatial flow are mainly confined on the heritage of the city centre. But the visitor`s impression of the capital is negative and dissatisfaction with public sector services occurs. Valuable visitor attractions are difficult to access and the tourism infrastructure is perceived as weakly developed. This emphasizes that the tourism officials are not able to create a fully convincing tourism product and they neglect other metropolitan-wide tourism potentials. Recommended future measures should improve the cooperation of supply-side stakeholders and tourism planning embracing the whole metropolis. Moreover, measures must improve tourism infrastructure, public sector services, marketing, and destination image of the capital in order to enhance its competitiveness