KUALA LUMPUR, July 27 (NNN-BERNAMA) — The domestic tourism industry has shown encouraging development after tourism activities were allowed to resume when the Recovery Movement Control Order was enforced on June 10.
Tourism, Arts and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Nancy Shukri said the average occupancy rate in several city hotels and resorts throughout the country was encouraging especially in locations which offer natural attractions like islands, beaches, highlands or forests.
She said 180,000 flight passenger seats were sold between June 10 and 28 for travel between July and September this year through domestic travel promotions by the AirAsia airline company.
“The weekly trend for accommodation also showed an increase compared to the week before. Although the increase is not drastic, it is an positive indication,” she said during the question-and-answer session at the Dewan Rakyat here today.
She was answering a question from Yamani Hafez Musa (BN-Sipitang) on the response from tourism operators and the public to the government’s domestic tourism campaign post COVID-19.
Nancy said the positive development is the result of initiatives by domestic tourism industry players through special travel packages with attractive promotion prices for hotels, flight tickets, and entrance tickets for tourism products and destinations.
Meanwhile, Nancy said following the cancellation of the Visit Malaysia 2020 (VM2020) last March, the RM90-million allocation was kept for the next VM campaign.
She added that although VM2020 was cancelled, the ministry was also monitoring to see that countries which were collaborating with Malaysia were those in the COVID-19 green zone category.
She was replying to a supplementary question from Ahmad Hassan (Warisan-Papar) who wanted to know the ministry’s plans for the allocation which had been provided for the campaign.