Tourism is known as one of the world’s largest industries; two of its notable components that cover areas of travel, service, accommodation, entertainment and wellness are sports and recreation. These activities ultimately make sports and tourism the fastest growing sector worldwide, especially in the Philippines.

 Sports tourism has played an important role in boosting the country’s travel and tourism industry as it attracts people from all walks of life to a particular location as a sport event participant or an event spectator. As a result, revenue streams and resources start flowing in for local event organizers and sports friendly businesses that impressively turns sports tourism into a multi-billion dollar a year industry.

The Sports Tourism Forum was established in 2005 by Selrahco Management’s Charles Lim as a platform to create awareness of the benefits of sports tourism across all regions. It  is committed to establish a particular city or province in the Philippines as an ideal sports city and to instruct destinations on how to successfully present their bid to host sports events.

Conducted with the full support of the Philippine Department of Tourism and its allied agencies, the local government units, and the local and multi corporations and tourism stakeholders, the purpose of STF is to evaluate sporting and tourist facilities in each location, establish local government unit and national sports association support, provide inputs on sports event organizing, share inputs on sports event marketing and sponsorship, and impart knowledge about media exposure on destination marketing.

 In 2005, STF first served the host cities of Cebu, Bacolod and Subic during the Southeast Asian Games in their preparation for the successful hosting and marketing of the games. The forum then expanded to Davao City, Puerto Princesa, Laoag, Angeles City/Clark, Dumaguete and Cagayan de Oro.