KUCHING: Sarawak has seen an increase of visitors from India by 304 per cent from January to July, 2022.
“We anticipate more arrivals as we open our borders with relaxed health protocols,” Minister of Tourism, Creative Industry and Performing Arts, Datuk Seri Abdul Karim Rahman Hamzah told the media here on Friday (Aug 26).
He said India ranked fifth in terms of visitor arrivals to Sarawak, marking a significance step in tapping into the Indian market.
“Tourist arrivals from India to Malaysia showed a positive trend, with a 15 per cent growth rate pre-pandemic in 2019.
“In addition, with projections showing that among the 21 million Indians going abroad, more than 25 per cent of these travellers are going out of the country for holiday.”
He said the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) named India as one of the fastest growing outbound markets in the world with the volume of travellers going up by 25 per cent each year.
“Sarawak began tapping into India as a new tourism market in 2019 and the effort was intensified in 2020 through the Sarawak Tourism Board’s (STB) participation in a series of webinars by Tourism Malaysia Chennai involving South Indian travel agents, highlighting Sarawak as a tourism destination.
“The interest towards Sarawak started to build up and this was manifested through STB’s inaugural virtual participation in ITB Asia India in 2021, followed by ITB Asia India in April this year.”
Abdul Karim added that this allowed Sarawak tourism to look forward to participating in more engagement sessions with Indian tourism stakeholders on a larger scale.
