Pages - Menu

Friday, January 7, 2011

Sarawak Tourism Board strives to boost domestic tourism

By George Francis

MIRI - The drop in foreign arrivals in 2010 will not dampen tourism effort, said Sarawak Tourism Board (STB) chief executive officer Datuk Rashid Khan.

He said foreign arrivals declined by 8.7 per cent from January to October last year compared to the corresponding period in 2009.

"Domestic arrivals increased by 19.5 per cent during the same period. The increase in domestic arrivals has definitely assisted in the upward trend of 1.4 per cent in total arrivals".

This was considered an improvement from the negative growth in the past two years, he said.

As an agency entrusted to promote Sarawak, STB's plans and implementation programmes cover a wide variety of destination marketing initiatives, which should deliver breakthrough results, he said.

The entry of Firefly into Sarawak beginning this month, he said, also deemed to be a good boost for domestic tourism.

"The commencement of flights from Tokyo's Haneda Airport, Osaka's Kansai Airport and Seoul's Incheon Airport into Kuching via Kota Kinabalu in Sabah starting mid this year should be supported so that these could be sustained".

He was also confident that the reinstatement of Air Asia's Singapore-Miri route would also augur well for the industry.

This included the initiative of STB's eight-month Singapore Integrated Packages campaign which commenced last October, added Rashid.

Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin
.
.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Infolinks