Philippines tourism gets an AI chatbot, but not from the DOT

Someone in Manila has decided that the Philippines' tourism front door is going to be an AI assistant. The Department of Information and Communications Technology has rolled out 'Kuya A', a chatbot baked into the eGovPH Superapp, which is reportedly sitting on a base of 40 to 60 million users. It answers travel questions. It does it without any connection to the Department of Tourism's own data or its accreditation registry. That's the detail in this open letter to Tourism Secretary Dita Angara-Mathay that should keep every hotel tech person awake.

Think about what that means operationally. An assistant with mass reach is serving tourism answers from outside the tourism authority's database. The hotels inside the accreditation system are invisible to it. The DOT is not in the loop on the answers its own market is getting. That's not a scandal, it's a plumbing problem, and plumbing problems are fixable.

My reading is simple: this is an opportunity, not a mess. If the DOT plugs its accreditation registry into Kuya A, every accredited Filipino property gets a free, government-backed distribution channel. That's a bigger audience than any OTA you'll sign this year. The conversation between DICT and DOT should start this week.