MUCH hoopla will be attached to 2019 in Sarawak as the state government has designated it as Visit Sarawak Year. In fact, it has already begun, with the state splashing its iconic hornbill symbol on the livery of AirAsia’s aircraft.
Count on all this to gather pace throughout the coming year. Not that the state needs much cause or reason to be throwing a bash in any case.
There seems to be an endless and bewildering array of events and activities in any given year — and mostly coming to life with generous state-funded support.
To be sure, most of these are fairly laudable initiatives which no doubt contribute their share to promoting general goodwill among the multi-ethnic population of Sarawak.
Aside from a few well-established annual events such as the Rainforest World Music Festival, it is questionable, though, if many of the other activities justify their purported rationale to attract many genuine and unique tourists who might otherwise not have come if not for all the organised events.
Sarawak’s efforts at tourism promotion continue to be seriously weighed down by the dearth of direct air connectivity which not only means intending tourists are inconvenienced by having to change planes at regional hub airports but also that there is minimal visibility in prime catchment areas in the region where tourists mostly would come.
A bright spot is medical tourism from Indonesia but not much beyond West Kalimantan just across the border.
Some promise from as far away as Jakarta cannot be fully tapped because there are no direct flights to Kuching from the Indonesian capital.
The same goes for the meetings and conventions sector. The bottleneck is invariably the limited capacity to bring visitors into Sarawak at any one time.
It is a classic chicken-or-egg first conundrum that has proven so far to be exceedingly difficult for the state to crack.
Airlines need actual numbers to fill up planes before they will mount flights but without the flights, the state is handicapped even if there is widespread publicity. The state government needs to urgently get a grip on this problem because the relative lack of direct air connectivity not only is a drag on tourism promotion efforts but even on business generally.
An importer of fresh produce recently lamented that his efforts to meet local demand for his imports from Australia are being stymied by logistical nightmares to do with bulk delivery of air freight into Kuching, given that the only wide-bodied cargo plane by Malaysia Airlines plying between Kuala Lumpur and Kuching is prone to rescheduling and cancellations depending on actual cargo volume, obviously an unacceptable risk if the cargo in question is highly perishable in nature.
As Sarawak mulls the export of high-end agricultural produce (it already sends fresh pork from an integrated pig farm outside Kuching to Singapore — the only such export approved from anywhere in Malaysia), a reliable air cargo service out of the state becomes imperative.
Air-cargo ser vices within Sarawak must also be looked into if the state is serious about promoting the digital economy.
Such logistical support services need to be readily in place in tandem with broadening the broadband network for e-commerce to really take off and thrive.
Given that AirAsia will effectively become the monopoly provider of air services between the major towns and cities of Sarawak, the concern must be to focus on satisfactory services for both air passengers and air-cargo users alike.
It is critical to the state’s overall interests that the state government not overlook how the whole aviation sector can be made to serve the state much better than it has so far.
This is one sector that Sarawak has clearly been overlooked and marginalised, to its economic detriment. If cajoling and inducing the national carriers have not worked satisfactorily, the state administration needs to start looking outside the box.
It probably needs to fight for a greater say as well on matters of aviation policy and study how the Asean Open Skies protocol in effect since 2015 may be utilised to open the skies over Sarawak to foreign carriers, including their operating to bring people and cargo from fellow Asean countries into Sarawak and onward to third destinations.
As it is, there are multiple issues to make Sarawakians feel alienated and aggravated from the rest of the country.
Let this not add to them.
John Teo views developments in the nation, the region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak