I SPENT the Labor Day weekend in Baler, Aurora, a location in the Philippines that I had not visited until now. I would describe it as a second-tier tourism destination; it is a lovely place with an abundance of attractions, but does not get mentioned in the frequent and clichéd praise heaped on Philippine tourism hotspots, which is limited to Boracay and El Nido. Baler is nonetheless popular among those who know about it. The popular Sabang area, which styles itself as the “birthplace of Philippine surfing,” was quite crowded over that weekend, although not to the uncomfortable extent the aforementioned famous destinations are all the time.
Those crowds, however, exposed a critical weakness in Baler’s potential to be the sort of “world-class” destination the Department of Tourism (DOT) would like to take credit for creating with its rather shallow approach of mere branding. Beginning at about 3 p.m. of May 1, the Sabang area started experiencing severe power fluctuations, and then a complete outage that lasted well into the evening hours. Almost every place in the area has a backup generator, and so for us visitors the episode was, at most, a minor annoyance. But of course, these kinds of things catch the attention of my inner nerd even if I’m on vacation, and so I started asking some questions.
In many places in the Philippines, and in Baler more than in some other places I’ve visited, a good way to strike up a conversation with the locals is to ask them about their electricity service. Everyone seems to have one grievance or many, and they are all too happy to discuss them at length. As far as the electricity service in the Baler area is concerned, the complaints were voluminous.
The service provider in that area is the Aurora Electric Cooperative (Aurelco), which, according to the National Electrification Administration’s (NEA) most recent quarterly compliance report (fourth quarter of 2025) has a “yellow” classification. This means it falls short on one or more of the 14 indicators tracked by the NEA. In Aurelco’s case, that is in its collection efficiency, which is below standard, but it otherwise meets the NEA’s benchmarks.
As I have said before, however, NEA compliance does not adequately capture true service performance, and nowhere is it more glaringly obvious than in Baler. Among the gripes aired by the people I talked to were:
– Complaints about high rates; the ranges I heard were from P22 to P25 per kilowatt-hour (kWh). By contrast, those of us in Meralco’s service area consider it calamitous when our rates hit P12 to P14/kWh.
– Unstable power, which the locals refer to as the “disco lights,” and which we experienced first-hand on both Friday and Saturday nights, when the lights in our hotel inexplicably began blinking due to voltage fluctuations. This seems attributable to the fact that the Sabang area, which is primarily commercial, is only wired for residential service (a common problem in many electric co-op service areas), as well as visibly rotting distribution infrastructure.
– Slow repairs and inadequate upgrades, which was obvious just by looking at the state of the equipment in the area. In one instance, I spotted one of the few larger commercial-grade transformers in the area mounted on the ledge of a building housing a small hotel, which violates more safety codes and practices than I can count. When I showed a picture of it to a friend of mine, an engineer connected with the Manila Electric Co. (Meralco), his response was, “Oh God, I hope that’s not one of ours.” I assured him it was not. The building owner in this case explained that Aurelco told her they realized it wasn’t an ideal location for the transformer, but that they didn’t have a post on which it could be mounted, as it should have been.
— Poor customer service. Several people explained that power outages and other problems were not monitored by Aurelco, and only addressed if someone reported them, which meant that sometimes hours would pass before any repairs were made. One small business proprietor also said Aurelco’s common response to power outages was to blame the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) for the problem, which she thought was laughable because “we’re not stupid; everyone knows to check the NGCP’s website and online updates when something happens, and it’s almost never their fault.”
Obviously, these issues concerning Aurelco need to be addressed, but there is a much bigger picture here because Aurelco is not unique, nor is electricity distribution the only basic infrastructure obstacle to the development and expansion of the tourism sector, or even its ability to simply conduct day-to-day business. What the DOT, and to some extent the entire government generally, fails to understand is that so much of what constitutes “tourism infrastructure” is not at all specific to tourism, but are just basic services — electricity, communications, water and sanitation, waste management, transportation infrastructure and networks, health care facilities.
As I have traveled around the Philippines, no matter what region I have visited or what level of tourism popularity each location has, it has become obvious that the country on the whole does not need a dedicated “Department of Tourism” nearly as much as the powers-that-be think it does. Filipino people, no matter where they’re from, are creative, ambitious and immensely proud of their communities, and are more than capable of welcoming visitors in their own unique ways.
What they need in order to put forth their best efforts are the basics — which they would deserve anyway, even if no outsider ever set foot in their areas — reliable utility and public services. Instead of branding and sloganeering and pointless artifices like “tourist rest areas” and DOT certifications, the government should focus on the fundamental, and let the destination communities handle the rest. If this approach can be taken, the world will beat a path to the Philippines’ door.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Bluesky: @benkritz.bsky.social
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