Observations from my five foreign trips in 2025

I was lucky to have taken five foreign trips this year — to Hong Kong and China last April, Spain in September, and Vietnam and Japan in November.

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All were work-related except the Vietnam trip, which was a vacation with my ex-UP Narra dormmates with our spouses and friends,

To help provide context to the observations I made about tourism during my travels, I constructed this table based on information from the UN Tourism website. I added a few other countries I have been to — like France as I had gone to Nice in 2023. I also added other East Asian neighbors to this table.

The Philippines has the smallest number of tourist arrivals in the table, mainly because of its geography. It is far away from the Asian mainland where visitors can go from, say, Vietnam to Cambodia to Thailand by car or bus aside from airplane. Add to this our generally poor infrastructure.

Here are some observations, some of which we can possibly adapt in the Philippines.

1. Hong Kong's huge airport is directly connected to the city by high-speed train, then one can go by taxi or subway to stations near hotels. There are also buses from the airport to major hotel corridors. The city’s long and modern subway trains and the huge skyscrapers continue to amaze me. It’s main attraction for international visitors is its unilateral free trade policy, with so visitors can find many items from China and many other countries at competitive prices. This is a combination of tourism and trade policy that the Philippines should consider.

2. While Beijing international airport is also huge and is connected to the city by a fast airport express train, our host picked us up by van as we stopped by a nice restaurant before going to our hotel. We took the toll road, but it was congested even on a Sunday night. China has become a car culture country unlike many decades ago where it was a bicycle and motorcycle riding country.