Malaysian tourism industry buoyed by Chinese visitors: research house

Malaysian tourism industry is expected to gain momentum following a mixed start this year, as consistent strong Chinese visitor arrivals have offset the decline of its top two sources of inbound tourists, namely Singapore and Indonesia.

Maybank Investment Bank Research said in a Wednesday report that despite a drop in the total visitor arrivals for the first four months, it is still encouraged by the robust Chinese visitor arrivals growth, and expects the growth to continue.

Citing statistics of a tourism platform ForwardKeys which indicated the flight bookings from China for the week beginning July 17 surged about 47 percent year-on-year. It believed the statistics portend continued year-on-year growth in Chinese visitor arrivals.

According to Tourism Malaysia, the country's tourist arrivals for the first four months fell 3.42 percent year-on-year to 8.48 million, with tourist arrivals from Singapore falling 18.3 percent year-on-year to 3.41 million. But visitor arrivals from China jumped 37.2 percent year-on-year to 1 million.

"At this rate, China may pip Indonesia to be the second largest source of visitor arrivals soon," the research house said.

As the average Chinese visitor spends about 4,000 ringgit (985.7 U.S. dollars) per trip or at least a third more than any other nationality, Maybank gathered that the total tourism receipts for the first four months may not ease according to the fall of total visitor arrivals.

While Singaporeans account for about half of total visitor arrivals in Malaysia, Maybank believed the decline in arrivals was mainly due to the strengthening Malaysian ringgit against the Singaporean dollars recently.

Malaysian government under the previous administration has set a target of tourist arrivals of 33.1 million and tourist receipts of 134 billion ringgit this year.

In 2017, tourist arrivals in Malaysia fell 3 percent year-on-year to 25.95 million, with its total tourist receipts remained unchanged at 82.1 billion ringgit.

Singapore, Indonesia and China were the three main visitors' sources for Malaysia last year. While the number of Chinese visitors rose 7.4 percent year-on-year to 2.28 million, the numbers of Singaporean and Indonesian visitors dropped 6.3 and 8.3 percent respectively to 13.27 million and 3.05 million last year. (1 U.S. dollar equals to 4.06 Malaysian Ringgit)