LETTER | Confusing tourist arrival figures

LETTER | I am bewildered by the report “Tourist arrivals to Malaysia poised to rise four-fold” published on Thursday.

According to Kenanga Research, tourist arrivals to Malaysia are projected to jump four-fold to 9.6 million in 2023 from an estimated 2.5 million a year ago on the back of the reopening of international borders.

If so, what I have written earlier was completely off the mark, as my figure for this year is about quadrupled and next year doubled.

I had predicted that foreign tourist arrivals will be about 9.7 million this year and would be around 18 million in 2023 - if there is no new coronavirus outbreak and China allows its citizens to travel freely abroad for leisure travel.

My figures were based on actual numbers that were posted on the website of Tourism Malaysia, which stood at 5,556,281 for the first nine months of this year.

Arrival figures for the first quarter of the year were only 98,053. But after travel restrictions were lifted in April and Covid-19 conditions eased from May, it skyrocketed to 2,034,107 in the second quarter.

The number shot up to 3,424,121 in the third quarter and I had predicted the figure to be around 4.2 million in the last quarter of the year. If so, total foreign arrivals would exceed 9.7 million.

Although there is a rare error in adding the figures in Tourism Malaysia’s report for August, the difference being 360 arrivals, all figures posted in the “Top 45 Tourist Arrivals” have been error-free so far.

And for the official record, foreign tourist arrivals were 26,100,784 in 2019, 4,332,722 in 2020 and 134,728 in 2021.

As such, I would assume that the reported 2.5 million figure appears to be plucked from the wrong source.

Many are unaware that foreign visitors that entered Malaysia and did not stay overnight are counted separately.

In 2019, there were 8,944,841 foreign excursionists - 1,768,656 in 2020, 265,137 in 2021 and 2,525,098 for the first nine months of 2022.

YS CHAN is a tourism and transport consultant and writer.

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