19,000 keys to improve Malaysian tourism

Saturday, April 1, 2023

The Southeast Asian nation is gradually reviving from the impact, with foreign arrivals starting to bounce back after it greeted them back in 2022.

As informed by Tourism Malaysia, global travellers visiting the country in 2022 reached almost 10.1 million with borders opening on April 1st and entry restrictions related to covid-19 subsequently being pulled off in August.

As this equates to a 7,375% rise from 0.1 million arrivals in 2021, it’s still 61% below of 2019, the last fully representative year which totaled 26.1 million worldwide tourists.

Exceeding the targets:
However, the figures of 2022 exceeded the initial target of the Malaysian government of 9.2 million foreign visitors and for 2023; the aim is to attract 16.1 million.

In 2022, the top origins for international arrivals were given attention to typically the neighbouring countries, with Singapore occupying the top spot in the list on 5.2 million, followed by Indonesia with 1.5 million, Thailand with 700,000, India with 325,000 and Brunei with 302,000 respectively.

In Malaysia, the existing hotel stock dropped a little during COVID-19, from 5,382 sites consisting of 340,547 keys in 2019 to 5,339 hotels in 2020 of 332,817 collectively then in 2021, around 5,170 properties, totaling to 323,491 keys, as per the recent figures from Tourism Malaysia.

So, in the next couple of years, with THP noting that at the minimum 65 further high end hotels will join the battle.

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