KUALA LUMPUR – The disappearance of Indonesia AirAsia Flight QZ8501 is another blow to Malaysia’s tourism that is still recovering from the twin disasters of MH370 and MH17, according to the Malaysian Association of Tour & Travel Agents (MATTA).
MATTA president Hamzah Rahmat told Malay Mail Online that although the latest incident involved an Indonesian entity, its link to Malaysia via the AirAsia brand was inevitable as the low-cost carrier was considered a home-grown business.
“It is very, very unfortunate that we are yet again, indirectly implicated in this... it is going to slow down our (tourism) industry for a while,” Hamzah said when contacted today.
“The thought that this is yet again another product of Malaysia that’s involved in such an incident might trigger fear among passengers, considering that there was never a banal period on Malaysia’s air tragedies throughout this entire year,” he added.
Hamzah said that Matta is currently in the midst of collecting feedback from key industry players to measure the impact on flight and hotel bookings from the incident.
“The flood this year has not troubled the industry much as the areas affected are not tourist hotspots, but the latest air incident just might again and we are bracing ourselves.”
Flight QZ8501, which carried one Malaysian on board, vanished from Jakarta’s radar at 6.18am local time yesterday amid stormy weather enroute to Singapore from Surabaya in Indonesia.
On board Flight QZ8501 were 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, one Malaysian, one Singaporean, one Frenchman and one Briton, comprising 155 passengers and seven crew members.
Indonesia resumed search operations for the missing jet early this morning, whose last known position was between the Indonesian port of Tanjung Pandan and the town of Pontianak, in West Kalimantan on Borneo island.
Malaysian-based AirAsia owns 49 per cent of Indonesia AirAsia.
The latest incident comes at the end of a disastrous year for Malaysian aviation in which flag carrier Malaysia Airlines lost two passenger planes in the space of months.
Flight MH370 went missing on March 8 while travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board. It remains missing until today.
On July 17, Flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. - Malay Mail
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.