Netting Tourists off the Net

So, even the Tourism Office is jumping on the bandwagon to tap Internet resources to woo in-bound tourists.

Tourism Malaysia intends to go big on this platform. It will promote tourism by engaging Facebook, Friendster, Twitter and other global social networks to attract visitors to the country, said its acting director-general. He said that the agency had just entered into internet marketing and was planning on several programmes to capture the huge and untapped market via such social networks.

“We want to go through community-based websites such as Facebook, Twitter and others. People spend a lot of time surfing (the) Internet and its influence is huge...social networks are becoming the favourite place to keep in touch and share experiences,” he said on the sideline of the Sixth Asean Leadership Forum here.

According to him, Tourism Malaysia had already embarked on Web TV, banner advertisements in Yahoo, MSN and Google. Facebook has 175 million members worldwide while Friendster has over 90 million. According to Compete.com which analyses web traffic, Facebook had 104 million visitors in April in the United States.

He said greater promotion through the internet was one of the plans adopted by Tourism Malaysia, in the wake of the global economic slowdown and its effect on the travel and tourism industries.

Malaysia, apparently was not badly affected by the crisis as the number of arrivals in the first four months showed positive growth as compared to last year, although neighbouring countries recorded reduced numbers. Many visitors avoided troubled Thailand and sought Malaysia which was a safe place to visit.

However, despite positive tourist arrivals, Malaysia had reduced its target of attracting 24 million tourists to 20 million in 2009, due to slower demand brought about by the economic crisis as well as the reduced travelling over the current Influenza A (H1N1) virus scare.

According to Toursim Malaysia, this need to change strategy is imperative. They said Malaysia works best under pressure. After having learnt from the 1997 financial crisis when tourist arrivals dropped to 5.5 million, it introduced the ‘Malaysia Truly Asia’ campaign, rapidly increasing tourist arrivals to 22 million in 2008.

Tourism revenue also jumped from US$4 billion to US$14 billion in the same period.

Well, we hope tourist arrivals are not too badly affected by the pandemic H1N1 scare.