Now is your chance to fly to the Philippines for FREE!

By PDOTSF / PNS
June 10, 2006

MANILA, Philippines –  Americans and Canadians as well as the Global Filipino communities in North America can finally push through with their plans to visit the archipelagic wonder composed of 7,107 tropical islands, now that the Philippine Department of Tourism (PDOT) has offered free roundtrip air tickets Manila through its latest program, The Philippines: Explore, Experience, and Return (PEER).

As part of the Philippine Tourism Grand Campaign for North America, this program is an online raffle promo that offers Global Filipinos from the United States and Canada the chance to visit the Philippines -- explore its natural and manmade wonders, experience its multifaceted culture and age-old traditions and return for an enjoyable and enriching vacation – for free!

To join the program’s first phase “Free Flight Giveaway” promo, participants can log on to the new portal www.experiencephilippines.ph for a chance to win one of the 250 round-trip plane tickets via Philippine Airlines and win a balikbayan box full of prizes during the second phase “Out-of-the-Box” promo, which will start later this year.

The Philippines: Explore, Experience, and Return (PEER) program will be launched during the annual Fiesta Filipina celebrations on June 10-11, 2006 at the Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco, California, USA.  It will be televised on the “WOWOWEE” show over The Filipino Channel.

During the pledging ceremonies with the program sponsors recently held at the Makati Shangri-la Hotel in Metro Manila, Tourism Secretary Joseph Ace Durano said that this travel initiative will sustain, if not exceed, last year’s volume of North American visitors to the Philippines. Of the approximately 3.3 million Global Filipinos living the United States alone, some 580,000 reportedly arrived in the country in 2005. Half of them were first-time visitors.

Through its “Out-of-the-Box” promo, PDOT will be handing out a fully-furnished condominium unit, discounted hotel accommodations, tour packages and balikbayan boxes – full of prizes for them to bring back home.

The initial set of corporate sponsors participating in this promo consists of Abenson, American Eye Center, Avis, Globe Telecom, Jollibee Foods Corporation, Kuok Group (EDSA Shangri-la, Makati Shangri-la and Traders Hotels, The Shangri-la Plaza Mall and The Shang Grand Tower Corporation for the St. Francis Towers), Philippine Airlines and the Philippine National Bank.