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BORDERS will eventually be reopened and will stay open for as long as the pandemic is under control.
As a quick succession of opening and closing of borders will bring more harm than good, the criteria used for making such impactful decisions should be made known.
Besides listing the requirements for entering and exiting the country, the overall situation and conditions for borders to remain open should also be spelled out so that the public can be more proactive as well as make timely changes when sensing an imminent closure of borders.
Prior to the pandemic in 2019, an average of 2,175,065 foreign tourists entered Malaysia monthly.
After the movement control order (MCO) was introduced in March 2020, the average dropped to only 9,588 per month during the 18-month period from April 2020 to September 2021.
When borders are finally reopened, hopefully soon, will there be an influx of foreign visitors?
Chances are not many will be leisure tourists on holidays.
The first waves will be on essential travel, including those for business, education, medical treatment, and visiting friends and relatives.
In the second quarter of 2019, the main purpose for more than 25% of foreign tourists that came to Malaysia was to visit friends and relatives.
During this three-month period, there was a total of 6,658,345 foreign tourist arrivals, averaging 2,219,448 per month.
But with high Covid-19 cases plus uncertainties, we may get only 20,000 foreign tourists in April 2022, which will be less than 1% of the 2,159,517 we had in April 2019.
If numbers were to increase by 20,000 monthly, then arrivals could reach 200,000 next January.
Sadly, international tourism will not recover by this year or the next.
This year may mark the beginning of a very long and slow recovery after borders are finally reopened, and next year could be even more arduous as unexpected or unprecedented challenges may surface.
Back in early July 2020, then prime minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin disclosed that the Economic Action Council had predicted that our local tourism business, which was the worst-affected industry by the Covid-19 pandemic, will need four years to recover.
But it will be difficult to attract a million foreign tourists a month in 2024 and even the years after that, let alone regaining the 2.2 million monthly as in 2019.
Therefore, inbound players should brace themselves for many more years of waiting for international tourism to fully recover.
Now, more than ever, tourism businesses can only survive or even prosper in the new normal if their products are geared more towards the domestic market instead of foreign, which used to be easy pickings when large numbers of other nationalities could travel freely to our country.
While hoteliers have switched from luxury five-star hotels catering to businessmen travelling on corporate expense to more affordable tourist-class accommodations for holidaymakers and budget hotels for locals, inbound tour operators have made little or no effort to change or adapt.
While it is true that very few tour packages are bought by residents as most can drive their own vehicles or book public transport and purchase a variety of tickets directly, tour operators ought to think outside the box to create innovative services that even locals would want or need.
This will not happen if they continue with the same old narratives.
Nothing short of a paradigm shift or a change of mindset is needed to think outside the box.
This can only come about when they participate in a tourism lab and find the courage in making the impossible possible.
If not, tour buses and vans that have remained mostly idle since March 2020 will continue into their third year.
These assets with hundreds of millions of ringgit in book value will be wiped out if left in storage yards or parked by the roadside, as they have little or no market value.
On the other hand, new services that could be offered in the local market could see hundreds of tour buses running in all cities, suburbs and around Peninsular Malaysia, catering mostly to thousands of residents daily with only the minority of passengers being foreign tourists.
YS Chan is Asean Tourism Master Trainer for travel agencies, master trainer for Mesra Malaysia and Travel & Tours Enhancement Course. He is also a tourism and transport industry consultant and writer. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
