Are we ready for Visit Malaysia 2026?

 

The infographics on “Visitor Performance to Malaysia” posted by Tourism Malaysia is still until April this year. With Visit Malaysia 2026 just around the corner, it is rather late in the day for the public, and especially the tourism industry players, to know for sure how well we have succeeded in attracting foreigners to our shores.

In October, Tourism, Arts and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Tiong King Sing replied in Parliament that international arrivals from January to August were 28,242,804. A few days ago, Tourism Malaysia deputy chairman Yeoh Soo Hin said in a statement that Malaysia recorded 28.24 million overseas visitors until August, a 14.5% jump.

But the media wrongly reported that the figure was for foreign tourists when it was for all visitors that included tourists who stayed for at least one night, and excursionists that entered and left the country the same day.

Foreign excursionists spent an average of RM348 in Malaysia last year, whereas foreign tourists spent 11.7 times more. It must be noted that tourism is more about expenditure than headcount, and the average value of a tourist is almost 12 times that of an excursionist.

From the onset, Malaysia’s target of international arrivals were based on tourist arrivals, not visitor arrivals. The highest recorded was 27.4 million in VMY 2014. Later, the targets and actual arrivals for tourists were as follows: 2017 (target 31.8m/actual 25.95m), 2018 (33.1m/25.83m), 2019 (34.5m/26.1m), and 2024 (27.3m/25m).

In recent months, the narrative has been switched from tourist arrivals to visitor arrivals. The higher sounding figure gave the impression that inbound tourism has been much more successful than it actually was.

For many years, I have been commenting on tourist arrival figures as soon as they were posted by Tourism Malaysia.

It was only from 2020 that I coined the term ‘visitor arrivals’ and pointed out that in 2019, we had 26.1 million tourist arrivals and 8.9 million excursionist arrivals, making it a total of 35 million visitor arrivals. Visitor arrivals for the first eight months of this year was 28.2 million.

At this rate, the total for the year will be around 42.3 million. It will require another 18.8 million foreign visitors in the last four months of the year to reach 47 million, as hoped by Tourism Malaysia in April.

Not only have we been missing target arrivals by a mile, many could not even differentiate between visitor and tourist arrivals.

We ought to get the fundamentals right, such as numbers and figures needed to measure the performance and focus for the best results.

Otherwise, we may be busy organising events centred at crowded places and claim success in attracting tourists when their presence there was just incidental. 

YS Chan is master trainer for Mesra Malaysia and Travel and Tours Enhancement Course and an Asean Tourism Master Trainer. He is also a tourism and transport business consultant.

The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT. 

- Focus Malaysia.