KOTA KINABALU: Sabah tourism players should keep abreast with the current trend among travellers, which is experiential travel.
Tourism Malaysia senior deputy director (Domestic and Events Division) Azilina Azni Zainal Abidin said these days, people like to go for staycations which are short holidays lasting one or two days.
This is the trend now where tourists are looking to experience the place and engage in healthy activities such as hiking, cycling and others, she said.
She said this during a briefing for Sabah and Labuan tourism players during the economic stimulus package 2.0 roadshow on tourism sector matching grant (GSSP) 2022 and tourism incentive fund (Gamelan) at a hotel here yesterday.
She cited gastronomy tourism as one of the current trends where people were willing to travel to try out the local cuisine.
"Malaysians like to explore, so we need to come up with creative and value-added tour packages. We need to give the travellers something that will become a trend. Once it is appreciated by Malaysians, it will attract foreign tourists to come," she said.
Tourism Malaysia Sabah director Ednie Rahma Ab Rahim, in her welcoming address, said the Covid-19 pandemic had posed a profound challenge to the tourism industry.
"The pandemic was a difficult period and caused big losses to the tourism ecosystem activities," she said.
To assist the recovery of the tourism industry, she said, the federal government had allocated RM25 million for GSSP to organise events and programmes.
A total of RM2 million was allocated for Gamelan to spark promotional activities for the industry.
Ednie said the government hopes to speed up the recovery process and carry out promotional programmes to woo more domestic and foreign tourists, especially now that the country's borders had reopened.
About 200 tourism players from Sabah and Labuan participated in the briefing via online platform while 50 attended physically.