Quick switch saves tourism arrivals from further drop

Kota Kinabalu: A quick switch of focus in tourism saved total arrivals from further declining after Sabah faced a steep drop in Chinese tourists last year. The 2014 Sabah tourism report card on Friday revealed that efforts in strengthening other market sources were fruitful in arresting the overall decline. The trend of weakening Chinese arrivals was also seen nation-wide and Sarawak as well as in neighbouring Singapore. "There was a 3.7 per cent drop in the overall 2014 tourist arrivals bringing a net total of 3.065m visitors compared to 3.181m in 2013.

"However we were quick to shift our dependency on China and moved to others, resulting in double digit growth on markets such as Japan (18.3 per cent), overall Europe (12.4 per cent) and United States (13.7 per cent)," said State Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister, Datuk Seri Masidi Manjun.

Other strong arrivals to Sabah were from South Korea with 114,240 visitors (increase of 7.6 per cent), UK and Ireland with a total of 33,578 (9.1 per cent) and Australia 29,626 (1.5 per cent).

Domestic tourism registered a drop of 2.6 per cent with a total of 2.234 mil compared to 2.293 mil in 2013.

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Kota Kinabalu: The Sabah Government continued its momentum in managing the economy in line with the commitment and spirit of the Sabah Maju Jaya (SMJ) when it posted record high state revenue of RM6.973 billion last year.

"Tourism contributed an estimated RM6.328 billion in receipts to the State economy in 2014. There were incidents that affected tourism last year that were beyond our control.

"But we managed to minimise the damage with the cooperation of the industry especially Malaysian Association of Tour and Travel Agents, Sabah Association of Tour and Travel Agents, Malaysian Association of Hotels, all 11 airlines both domestic and foreign carriers as well as our overseas partners."

"We strengthened our efforts in the long-haul market in 2014 and will continue further this year," said Masidi.

He also outlined plans for tourism in 2015 namely to re-evaluate strategies on domestic tourism and to put greater focus on countries which performed well last year.

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Sabah Tourism will also take another look at the Indonesia and Singapore markets especially after policies laid out during the recent Asean Foreign Minister's Retreat held here.

"In view of the global economic situation, we need to be cautiously optimistic of doing better than last year," he said.

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