Hot spot: Crowds flock to Armenian Street in George Town during long weekend holidays.
PETALING JAYA: Malaysia is set to host another Visit Malaysia Year (VMY) campaign in 2025, nearly five years after the highly-anticipated Visit Malaysia 2020 was cancelled because of the pandemic.
In his speech, the Prime Minister said the government had set a target of 23.5 million international arrivals for VMY 2025, with RM76.8bil in tourism receipts.
This will be the sixth time a VMY campaign is held in the country; the first one was held in 1990 and recorded 7.4 million arrivals.
Before the pandemic, Malaysia recorded an average of 25 million international arrivals annually, with over 26 million recorded in 2019.
In that same year, Malaysia also recorded an all-time high of RM86.1bil in tourism receipts.
The tourism sector is also getting an allocation of RM250mil, of which RM115mil will be set aside to provide matching grants for tourism and cultural promotional purposes.
The matching grants are also meant to encourage companies to promote Malaysia through tourism activities and hold large-scale events including international sporting events and cultural festivals. Not everyone was happy with the allocation, however.
The Malaysian Budget and Business Hotel Association (MyBHA) said Budget 2023 was insufficient to help hotel operators sustain their businesses.
While MyBHA president Sri Ganesh Michiel expressed his gratitude for the funds allocated in Budget 2023, he also said that it did not seem to provide a positive long-term effect for the recovery efforts of the hospitality sector.
He pointed out that to tackle restoring the capacity of the hospitality sector, for example, a specific and special approach was needed.
“The government should introduce a budget that is more effective in resolving threats to the industry as well as recovering tax loss.
“Implement a specific law to regulate Short-Term Residential Accommodation and all types of Online Travel Agencies,” he added.
Referring to the absence of changes in the annual threshold value of service tax for the hotel industry, Sri Ganesh said this would pose an adverse effect on budget hotels, despite having been proposed multiple times.
“Budget hotels are an industry used by the B40 group. The government should strive to introduce a ‘better, friendly and effective’ budget for the tourism and hospitality industry,” he said.
