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Cebu is “The Queen City of the South”, “The Island in the Pacific” and such other fetching titles that are credited to her. Just as we thought that Cebu is about white sand beaches, nice places to see, delectable food, history and culture, and I'm afraid that sooner all these will be forgotten now that we have all these websites that have become increasingly popular that talk about Cebu's "whorific" side.
A month ago I received a private message from a stranger on Facebook (a Briton) asking my advice if there’s a “decent place” to stay for the next two weeks to meet his fiancée whom he said is from southern Leyte. Trying to be of help, I reassured him that there are tons of hotels in Cebu even for budget-conscious visitors. I gave him a few hyperlinks to some of our popular hotels and returned a thank you message for the help.
To my surprise, the guy messaged back and said he had so much fun while in Cebu. Unfortunately, he broke up with his girlfriend and found another sweetheart while he was here. Since I really don’t know the guy, I did not bother to make a reply. He came back with another message the next day flooding me with dozens of links on escort services in Cebu. He was obviously pissed by the fact that his new love interest was in one of those websites. And now he wants to go back with the girl he broke up with. I could not help but laugh to find a dose of his own karma that he so deserved. (LOL)
But I was beginning to get interested about the links he sent. And it was troubling to discover that foreigners know where to find these escorts better than our law enforcement people because of these websites. And if you’re going to make a traffic analysis on them, they get tons of visits everyday. These websites are optimized by their web owners so they get found easily on search engines. For example, if you type in “Cebu bars” you will find that Google returns not only bikini and gay bars, but “hooker hotels” and escort services in the first few pages of the search results. A would-be visitor who is in search for clean and wholesome entertainment in Cebu would probably think that we have a dirty nightlife.
Now type in “Cebu escort services” and get a load-ful of sites that lead you to “instant dates,” “strip clubs”, “climax massage,” and all these “extra” services to lure even the not-so-into-this kind-of-stuff tourist. I have every reason to believe that there are foreigners who are also involved in this other form of human trafficking and it baffles me why nobody from our law enforcement is running after them to think that they are out there in the open ready to be caught.
More than just law enforcement, I do not know of any program from legit companies or from the tourism department itself to preserve or if not, recover Cebu’s reputation on the internet. I don’t want to say this, but Cebu is fast becoming a haven of “flesh tourism” with the wake of these growing number of websites that are added into cyberspace everyday that tourists know there way to the best bargain better than local patrons. They are all over the streets of Colon, in the uptown area, in hotels and resorts in Lapu-Lapu “doing business” even in broad daylight.
Worse, is that those tourists brag about their sexcapades in their blogs adding up to the embarrassment; the bad impression and other indirect affronts to Cebu’s reputation as a legitimate tourist destination.
The tourism councils in Cebu and Lapu-Lapu should make the first step to fight it out in the web to dissipate this mis-representation. It is not enough to brag about the beautiful sights, what’s new or interesting in Cebu or what we can offer. Eventually, they will be buried in the minds of tourists when they get to see a deluge of dirty information that gets through their computer screens. It is also important to lead in the campaign to weed out undesirable service providers in the tourism sector. They do not only ruin our name. They are a danger to the industry and to the society.
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