Ways to overcome barriers to tourism in Malaysia

10. You and your friends would like to offer some ideas on how to overcome barriers to tourism in Malaysia.

   Malaysia’s Ringgit plunged below four to the US dollar for the first time since 1998 amid lower oil prices and unabating political issues but it’s a good thing, according to tourism and culture minister Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz, who said that the tumbling Ringgit will favour the local tourism industry.
Well, in theory, a weaker currency should encourage overseas tourists with stronger currencies to spend their money here. It should also encourage everyday folks like you and I to holiday domestically, as overseas vacations are just too expensive now. But real-life statistics suggest differently.

In fact, our tourism industry has pretty much been going down the drain. Some 27.4 million people visited Malaysia in 2014, but that number of tourist arrivals in Malaysia has seen a 30% drop in the last six months alone, according to the Malaysian Association of Tour and Travel Agents (MATTA).
The real questions is – what has gone wrong? Why are tourists not coming? The first reason tourists are not coming to Malaysia is the lack of marketing effort to promote the country. We do not have a strong ambassador to promote the country and its assets such as the food, culture, beautiful beaches, exotic fruits, large shopping malls, education and many more other assets. We have a big advantage as people in Malaysia are multilingual. Malaysian people are able to speak many languages such as English, Mandarin, Malay, or even Japanese

 Our ability to speak many languages makes us able to cater to to tourists from places like China, The United States of America, Europe or anywhere else in the whole wide world. However, we lack publicity worldwide. We need to step up our game in doing advertisements. With the availability of social media in the 21st century, doing advertisement is not a difficult thing because we can just upload pictures and market our country on social media. We can also easily make friends online through applications such as hello pal and encourage friends from other countries to come to visit our country.

Neighbouring countries like Thailand are doing a great job in marketing their durian. Where is Philippines is doing a good job in marketing your mango and exporting dried mangoes to other countries. Singapore also the exports durian to other countries and claim that it is made in Singapore. In fact, our country, Malaysia has a massive supply of scrumptious durians like Musang King, D24, D101 and others. Even the cheap durian here is more tasty than the durian in Thailand. We do have top class quality mango here too. We also have coconuts that taste amazing. The only problem is that our country failed to market our delicious fruits to other countries or encourage tourists to come here and try the fruits on their own to get a taste of it in person to see how delicious it actually is.