Baguio relaunches local tourism industry and protects visitors with Oracle Cloud

The city of Baguio is known as the summer capital of the Philippines and the first UNESCO Creative City in the country, attracting more than 1.5 million visitors a year. The city was severely impacted by the pandemic, with lockdown orders devastating local tourism and the economy. 

As soon as domestic travel in the Philippines was permitted again, Baguio wanted to start reviving tourism activities to recuperate its losses. A “Breathe Baguio” campaign aimed to heal the body, mind, and soul. However, to meet regulations and keep visitors and the local population safe, the City Government of Baguio needed an integrated management system to register and track visitors to prevent the continued spread of the COVID-19 virus.

With travel restrictions being lifted in a matter of months, Baguio wanted to launch the system fast. However, its existing on-premises infrastructure lacked the flexibility to develop the system quickly or scale it rapidly as visitor numbers increased.

The city needed a nimble cloud solution that supported easy scaling and kept user data protected. Because disruption to visitors had to be minimal, Baguio also wanted a solution that delivered reliable performance and fast data processing.

The city of Baguio selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to develop its registration and tracking system, called Visitor Information and Travel Assistant (VISITA), for several reasons. OCI offered a zero-trust security design to safeguard healthcare-related data. OCI also enabled Baguio to quickly build a simple-to-manage cloud native application for VISITA that could be easily developed over time. The single-vendor solution also made the application easier to support.

Through OCI, Baguio gained access to Oracle Cloud Native Services, including OCI Container Registry and Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE), to build the application in just days. OKE also came as a fully managed, scalable, and highly available service for easily deploying containerized applications in the future. Furthermore, OKE tightly integrated with other OCI cloud services for an end-to-end solution.

For security, Oracle Web Application Firewall combined threat intelligence with consistent rule enforcement to protect against malicious internet traffic. Running MySQL HeatWave Database Service on OCI also meant Baguio could run VISITA applications using the open source database in OCI while eradicating time-consuming management tasks.

As a result of using OCI, Baguio was able to launch the cloud native VISITA application in just one week. Compared to running a similar application on-premises, the city saved 55% in costs. The elasticity of the cloud platform also means VISITA can scale up during peak season, when the number of visitors can be five times greater than during the off-season.

The OCI-based VISITA application has become a vital tool in the city’s relaunch of local tourism and the economy. Baguio can now regulate entry and monitor a visitor’s mobility through VISITA’s ticketing system, which uses a QR-coded Tourist Pass. The city can also enforce health and safety protocols, from mandated triaging to digital check-ins for contact monitoring, as it opens up to welcome international visitors.

Oracle partner TechEdge Solutions and its associates worked with the City of Baguio to ensure VISITA was developed and running well on OCI. TechEdge continues to support Baguio to expand VISITA and develop other applications for local government units.