By John McLean BBC Manila correspondent

The bomb attacks on the Indonesian resort island of Bali have damaged the tourism industry throughout southeast Asia but is fear of terrorism the root cause of the slump in the number of tourists visiting the Philippines?

The tourism industry should be one of the stars of the Philippine economy, given the country's beaches, mountains, golf courses, casinos - and friendly people.

But foreign tourists are not coming.

The conventional wisdom here is to blame terrorists for scaring them off.

There's the home-grown variety, such as the Abu Sayyaf, a small band of armed Filipino Muslims who are in the habit of kidnapping tourists from beach resorts for ransom.

And there are communist guerrillas who are occasionally accused of taking pot-shots at visitors climbing the Mount Pinatubo volcano.

Both groups are regarded by the government as terrorists.

Then there's the more international Jemaah Islamiya, who have been blamed for the bomb attacks in neighbouring Bali, and who are often described as the south east Asian wing of al-Qaeda.

Filipino restaurant?

Comforting as it is for the tourism industry to blame terrorism, in fact, foreign holidaymakers stopped coming to the Philippines a long time ago.

There has been a decline in visitor arrivals every year since they reached a peak of 2 million in 1997 - which is strange, because that was the year of the Asian Financial Crisis.

Since then the Philippine peso has lost half its value against the US dollar, so this country should be flooded with visitors enjoying a bargain holiday - as nearby Thailand has been in recent years.

What scares off the tourists is not so much a lack of security, it is a lack of quality.

Ask any visitor who has been flummoxed by bathrooms without recognisable plumbing, by waiters who - even by the standards of waiters the world over - are uncannily oblivious to their customers, or by cooks who respond to an order for toast by rustling up a couple of slices of warm bread.

I am often asked what Filipino food is like. My polite answer is that in almost every major city in the world you can find Chinese restaurants, Indian restaurants, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese. But how often will you find a Filipino restaurant?

"Out of Service with a smile"

The Philippines' premier beach resort, Boracay Island, was so troubled by power cuts that earlier this year the authorities took over the local electricity distributor, which had persistently failed to pay for the power it sold on.

Yes, the people are friendly: this is the land of "Out of Service with a smile".

The Philippines, in short, is simply poor value for money.

And that's especially so, given the inclination within the tourism industry to quote prices in US dollars - dollar prices that often look suspiciously similar to those asked before the Asian financial crisis put the skids under the peso.