The Malaysian Insight

A LOCAL travel fair will be held in April in a move to help the tourism industry recover from the effects of the China coronavirus epidemic.

Malaysian Association of Tour and Travel Agents (Matta) president Tan Kok Liang said the inaugural Cuti-Cuti Malaysia fair will be on April 4 to 5 at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre.

“In view of the current sentiment, this is the best time to launch a new Matta fair for local tourism. It is the best time for Malaysian holiday-makers to enjoy domestic holidays safely and without any worry,” he said today.

Tan said this was different from the regular Matta fair, which promotes both local and overseas holidays, and which will be held in May instead of March this year.

He said this year’s fair will be held on May 1 to May 3.

The Matta effort to boost domestic tourism comes after industry players said the coronavirus outbreak in China had caused at least 5,000 tour group bookings to be cancelled and made Visit Malaysia Year targets difficult to achieve

They told The Malaysian Insight the scrapped hotel and restaurant bookings were worth RM400 million.

Some hotels have allowed tour groups to reschedule while others have given them a grace period of up to two months to pay for the bookings. That is not the case for restaurants, which do not offer refunds.

Most of the cancellations were from tour groups from China, for the January-March period.

Putrajaya has targeted 30 million tourist arrivals, four million of them from China alone, this year under the VM2020 campaign

In anticipation of a drop in Chinese tourist numbers, Tan earlier said Matta had started exploring other markets, such as Southeast Asian countries, India and domestic tourists, with discussions ongoing with national and state tourism departments.

He said Malaysia had a resilient tourism industry, pointing to how it had thrived despite the SARS and MERS crises in 2012.

As of this morning at least 1,016, people in China have died from the virus while two more people have been infected in Hong Kong and the Philippines. – February 11, 2020.