MANILA - The Department of Tourism (DOT) has launched an online training program to help the tourism sector cope with the fallout of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, a high-ranking government official said Saturday.

Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles, spokesperson of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Disease (IATF-EID), said DOT's program was conducted through video conferencing, which would allow stakeholders to embrace the "new normal" in the industry.

The program will cover tourism enterprises, which involves monitoring, evaluating and learning from past and present situations to enable tourism stakeholders to prepare better for the future, he said.

The DOT will also discuss the "Filipino brand of service," which applies 7 values that characterize Philippine hospitality, Nograles added.

"Namely may likha, makatao, makakalikasan, makabansa, masayahin, may–bayanihan and may–pag–asa," he said in a virtual press briefing.

(Creative, humane, environmental, patriotic, happy, cooperative, and hopeful.)

In a statement released Thursday, Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo-Puyat urged stakeholders to participate in the program in an effort to move towards recovery.

“We can turn the temporary inactivity during lockdown into an opportunity to enhance the quality of tourist services. We can objectively look back at our past and current performance and utilize the breathing space to plan how we can further upgrade our services in our respective areas in the industry with the values of Filipino hospitality,” she said.

The agency will also develop additional modules on other topics.

"The DOT will continue to develop other online courses to enhance skills, assist and encourage stakeholders to cope, transition and move towards recovery," she added.

The COVID-19 crisis has withered tourist arrivals in the country due to travel restrictions enforced to contain the outbreak.

In February alone, tourist arrivals in the Philippines dropped 41.4 percent compared to 2019, Romulo-Puyat earlier said.

"If you want to look at the occupancy rates, in Boracay it's 40 percent down, in Cebu, it's 27 percent down, and Bohol, it's 40 percent down," she said.

The DOT has allocated P6 billion for "international and domestic promotions, infrastructure, and regional tourism development."

Romulo-Puyat said the amount would be spent on a new campaign for domestic travel (P421 million), engaging content to resonate with emerging countries unaffected by COVID-19 (P467 million), conducting and participating in international events and marketing initiatives worldwide (P725 million), night rating of secondary airports (P1.6 billion), training for COVID-19 protocols for industry stakeholders (P85 million), aid for local governments' tourism master plan (P400 million), and infrastructure development and expansion (P2.2 billion), among others.