Cebu has potential to be destination for international students: CBC head

By Katlene O. Cacho

Sunday, December 18, 2011

THE lack of educational facilities and “little interest” among stakeholders have prevented Cebu City from becoming the alternative educational destination for international students, a top official of the Cebu Business Club (CBC) said.

“Cebu has a lot of potential, especially on educational tourism. However, there is a little buy-in among educators themselves,” CBC president Dondi Joseph said in a recent interview.

Joseph said that despite the province’s advantage of having excellent educators who can communicate well with foreign students, Cebu and the academe are not prepared for this type of tourism.

“It could be that this would entail a huge investment for the academe or maybe they (academe) just don’t need it,” Joseph said.

He cited the lack of educational facilities such as decent boarding houses or integrated facilities as one of the many concerns in the promotion of educational tourism.

According to Joseph, educational tourism is an emerging trend that can propel growth in Cebu’s tourism industry.

He said Cebu could be an attractive alternative education destination for foreign students because of its tourist attractions, affordability of education and Cebuanos’ English fluency.

“With infrastructure in place, the education tourism program may be complemented with some other tourist promotion programs of Cebu,” Joseph said.

To push for educational tourism, Joseph said Cebu could take advantage of the tourists that leisure companies bring in here.

Joseph cited in particular the 30,000 Chinese students that leisure company Dong Fang
Leisure Philippines bring in every month to Cebu.

“If Cebu will take advantage of this, then Cebu will have almost 400,000 Chinese tourists in a year, which could help increase tourist arrivals in Cebu by 30 percent.” Joseph said.

Tourism arrivals in Cebu grew by 11.33 percent from 1.1 million arrivals in the first eight months of 2010 to 1.3 million in the first eight months of this year, according to Department of Tourism 7 records. Koreans are still Cebu’s top travel market with 250,353 arrivals so far this year.

Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on December 19, 2011.