LETTER | Expedite travel with five countries

LETTER | Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Economy) Mustapa Mohamed disclosed that the governments of Malaysia and Singapore are in discussions to reopen borders with proper standard operating procedures (SOPs) in place.

The sooner citizens of both countries can visit one another, the better for the economy, and in particular the tourism industry, as many businesses are under intensive care if not in a coma, while some have perished during the lockdown.

Malaysia should also be involved in active talks with Indonesia, China, Thailand and Brunei, as together with Singapore, these five countries accounted for 85 percent of the 2,463,775 fewer foreign tourist arrivals in the first quarter of this year.

Tourism Malaysia had just released figures for foreign tourist arrivals in the first three months of this year, and it is no surprise that total numbers dropped by 36.8 percent compared to the corresponding period last year.

The decrease was minimal in January, from 2,195,684 in 2019 to 2,164,459 this year but plunged by 35.5 percent in February from 2,165,933 to only 1,397,912. 

With countries closing borders in March and with Malaysia implementing the movement control order (MCO) from March 18, arrivals for the month were reduced to a record low of 671,084 against 2,334,613 last year.

But the worst would be figures in the second quarter as only a trickle of selected foreigners could enter the country with none on leisure travel. International tourism grounded to a halt during this period and hopefully will begin its slow recovery in the second half of this year. It will take a long time to return to 2019 levels when we had 26.1 million arrivals for the year.

Amazingly, there was an increase of arrivals in the first quarter from three of the 45 countries listed. They were Sri Lanka by 15.5 percent, Ukraine five percent and Saudi Arabia 33.3 percent. But more significant were actual numbers with Sri Lanka increasing by 1,073 to 8,011, Ukraine by 277 to 5,863 and Saudi Arabia by a hefty 5,802 to 23,240.

The biggest drops of visitors were from Singapore decreasing by 1,084,534, China (440,733), Indonesia (223,774), Brunei (183,612), and Thailand (157,934). 

Our tourism recovery will depend on how well we manage to restart the flow of these five major tourist pipelines.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.