Koronadal City—South Cotabato is inspired to craft thrilling activities and cultural experiences to bring more domestic and foreign tourists this 2020. The Provincial Tourism Unit revealed that there were 1, 226, 960 tourist arrivals last year.
Richie Matunding, Program Assistant, said that in 2018, tourists’ arrival was at 941, 952, a whopping increase compared to last year.
The record stressed out that tourists started to arrive from April to July because of the school break and in time for the yearly Tnalak Festival.
Domestic tourists are still the major tourists who frequently visited South Cotabato. The data showed that there were 1.2M local tourists and at least 5, 000 foreigners visited the province last year.
However, tourists in South Cotabato tend to stay just for a day. There were at least 800, 000 same-day tourists recorded but there were more numbers of foreigners who decided to stay overnight last year.
In a separate interview, Argie Asaria, Tourism Officer, said the province is focused on building homestays to market cultural experiences in South Cotabato.
“Millennials are into experiences. They wanted to immerse themselves. They are more adventurous in terms of cultural experiences,” Asaria said, stressing that Millenials are major active players in the tourism industry.
South Cotabato, an hour drive from the capital General Santos City, is a landlocked province with clean rivers and placid lakes inside. Highways are wide and concrete. Fruits and vegetables are in abundance all year round. This diverse province down south of Mindanao is rich in cultural diversity and has already produced two National Living Treasures.
Old people here lived until more than a hundred years old.
South Cotabato is home to the widely known Tnalak, a cloth patterned through a dream.
