Manila: The Philippines said Wednesday it had pulled a tourism promotion campaign off the Internet after just one day, after the rebrand was severely panned by industry critics.
"Bland," "Lacks punch", "Sounds dishonest" were among posts made on popular networking sites about the "Pilipinas Kay Ganda" (Philippines What a Beauty) website launched by the tourism department to much fanfare late Monday.
Ministry spokeswoman Evelyn Macayayong said the government acknowledged the criticisms and pulled down the website on Tuesday for revisions.
"The writeups were not thoroughly edited. There were errors, and there are even allegations of plagiarism, that we copied from other websites," Macayayong told AFP.
The aborted tourism campaign was topbilled by a candy-coloured logo of the slogan adorned with a coconut tree, an endangered tiny primate called a tarsier, the sun and waves.
Critics called for the country's eight-year-old tourism slogan, "Wow Philippines", to be retained.
Filipino tourism industry pundit Ivan Henares wrote on his popular tourism blog, "Ivan About Town": "I can't understand why (we) want to get rid of a brand our country has worked so hard to build and invested so much money on."
Prominent tourist guide Carlos Celdran wrote on Facebook that the government could have done better with "Mabuhay (Long Live the) Philippines," which the ministry had used prior to "Wow Philippines".
"It's our Ole. It's our Aloha. Seriously. It's one word in Tagalog (Filipino) that I think a lot of foreigners might even know," he added.
Macayayong, the ministry spokeswoman, defended the new slogan.
"It raises awareness. It inculcates pride in our identity," she said.
However the government has restored its previous website (at www.tourism.gov.ph) following the criticism. Macayong said she could not say when the edited version of the new one would go live.
The Philippines has been struggling to shake off its image as an unsafe destination after a botched police rescue of foreign tourists seized in a bus by a dismissed policeman in August that left eight Hong Kong residents dead.
Macayayong said tourist arrivals in the eight months to August were up 14 percent from a year earlier to 2.1 million. However, the government has said it expects some fallout from the fiasco for the rest of the year.
