NEW YORK: After hitting international headlines in 2014 because of three airplane tragedies in 2014, Malaysia entered the New Year with renewed vigour and made a strong pitch as a destination at the three-day New York Times Travel Show which ended Sunday.
The show is rated as the most important consumer event for the travel and tourism industry on the east coast.
Tourism Malaysia’s New York office, which set up a pavilion at the show, reinforced Malaysia’s attractiveness as a tourist destination, distributing literature and other materials to visitors to the pavilion, providing glimpses of Malaysia’s cultural diversity through dances and other activities, and also highlighting many of the country’s tourism attributes.
The Malaysia pavilion, with its strategic location in the Asia section of the hall, saw a steady stream of curious visitors who sought information about specific areas of interest.
With Malaysia Airlines (MAS) no longer flying to the United States and direct air connectivity between the United States and Malaysia non-existent, tourism traffic from United States relies on third country airlines to fly to Malaysia such as Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Etihad, etc. with which Tourism Malaysia has close cooperation in its tourism-promotion endeavours.
MAS has recently appointed Aviaworld as its general sales agent in the United States. Aviaworld has its headquarters in Los Angeles but has an office in New York.
Daisy Diaz, Aviaworld’s sales executive, told Bernama that her company was appointed general sales agent effective Sept 15, 2014.
Diaz spoke of MAS’ “good image” because the carrier offered good quality services and has advantages by virtue of its membership in the One World alliance.
MAS has code-sharing with a number of One World members: it offers, for instance, flights from New York to London Heathrow by American Airlines and thence with MAS to Kuala Lumpur, while on the coast it offers flights from Los Angeles via Tokyo with Japan Airlines.
According to Diaz, many Asian travellers use the MAS service to visit Southeast Asia.
CHM Hotels, a Malaysian group of hotels, was also receiving enquiries from visitors to the Malaysian pavilion; CHM Hotels was represented by Las Vegas-based Eric Tan who looks after the hotel group’s North American sales.
Tan said business was good as occupancy had been strong.
“Business traffic from the United States to Malaysia has been good. We have different categories of hotels ranging from five star to three star properties,” Tan told Bernama.
Tan, who is of Malaysian origin, was upbeat about Malaysia as a destination. Travel by businesspeople and professionals to Malaysia, in particular, had not been affected, Tan maintained.
“People are generally impressed by hospitality, food, the warmth of the people, etc. Many of our guests love the beaches and are impressed with Malaysia’s scuba-diving facilities which are considered to be the best in the world,” he added.
Business travellers, generally, use Malaysia as one of their stops when they tour Southeast Asia, according to Tan.
Mary Scully, the marketing manager at Tourism Malaysia’s New York office, said that the show had been good for Malaysia.
“We are working with some organisations ... we do not have figures, as yet, of traffic from the United States to Malaysia for the whole of 2014 but the numbers from January to October 2014 show a distinctly positive trend.
“Despite the challenges faced by us last year, our tourism figures were not affected to the extent we had feared,” Scully said in an interview with Bernama at the show.
Scully pointed out that Tourism Malaysia had a new marketing campaign. The organisation was promoting new festivals such as the Rain Forest Music Festival, the Chinese New Year, Thaipusam, Colours of Malaysia, etc.
“I am very happy with the response at the show. We have established many new contacts and talked to a number of organisations,” she said.
According to Tourism Malaysia, the January-October 2014 period, for which the figures have been compiled, showed that 219,900 visitors from the United States were clocked in Malaysia, up from 201,887 in the year-earlier period, reflecting a 8.9 per cent surge.
Some 20,867 visitors from the United States were clocked in Malaysia in the month of October 2014, up from 19,795 in the year-earlier month, reflecting a 5.4 per cent increase on a month-to-month comparison. – BERNAMA