A significant number of tourists in most Southeast Asian economies are comprised by regional visitors.
Among the first six members of ASEAN, the Philippines appeared to be the only member country
receiving relatively lower arrivals of regional tourists. This characteristic is obviously the result of
deficiency in infrastructures to facilitate tourists as well as the lack of precise security needed for tourism
development. The potential significance of regional tourism for the Southeast Asian economies was
acknowledged soon after the formation of ASEAN. In the charter of ASEAN, regional tourism
collaboration was given a particular place in an attempt to establish regional peace and progress. Although
trade and economic development were the main targeted areas of Southeast Asian regional cooperation,
tourism has recognized as an important tool to foster these activities. Nevertheless, until 1990s regional
tourism received only insignificant importance for the Southeast Asian economies (Ghimire, 2001).
During 1990s, the share of regional tourism within Southeast Asian boarders was found to be somewhat
low as most of the international tourists’ arrivals had their transit through Thailand and Singapore.
However, the scenario had started reshaping since the beginning of 2000. The emergence of low-cost
carrier is also playing an important role to this regional growth of tourists’ arrival. Given the evolving
change, regional tourism has the potential, to a greater extent, for increased investment. This will certainly
assist in generating income and employment for diverse segments of population. The importance should
be given to intra-regional tourism development in that the economic benefits of regional tourism remain
within the region. To ensure this, there is a need to undertake some initiatives as most of the initiatives to
boost the regional tourism remain hypothetical. A repeated method of policy monitoring along with the
critical evaluation of policy are to be devised in order to upgrade the current regional tourism strategies.
This is analogous to the study of Ghimire (2001) in which the author mentioned that most of the activities
remain either exhausted or stuck at the level of a declaration of good intentions and elaboration of policy
strategies.