MALAYSIA: Malaysia's Tourism Industry Urged To Adopt New Technology To Attract Tourists

Malaysia's tourism industry needs to adopt new technology to attract tourists, said an integrated amusement park solutions and services provider.

London Stock Exchange-listed Galasys PLC said as consumers get savvier, the tourism industry needs to leverage on new technology to revamp the traditional approaches to attract tourists.

"There is a marked rise in the investment in digital channels and computerisation among Asian theme park operators. However, on the Malaysian front, investments have been rather slow due to the new Goods and Services Tax and weaker currency," the Malaysia-based company said in a statement yesterday.

According to Tourism Malaysia, tourist numbers dropped 9.4% between January and June this year, with 12.56 million foreign visitors recorded during this period compared to 13.87 million in the same period in 2014.

Arrivals from China was the worst hit, falling from 520,400 during January to March last year to 380,000 (-28.5%) in the same period this year.

Galasys said the average Chinese tourist rarely travelled beyond Kuala Lumpur, Genting Highlands and Malacca, due to the language barrier and lack of an easy method to book packages across the country.

It felt the Malaysian Tourism industry needs to look into changing the way it promotes Malaysia to the world.

"While tourism ads may have been successful in the past, it seems to be less effective with today's Internet driven tourist," it added.

Galasys said leveraging on the success of its Intelligent Tourism Cloud Marketing Platform (ITCMP) in China, it intends to invest and deploy it in Malaysia and other Asian cities.

ITCMP integrates big-data analytics to allow tourists in China to choose attractions, restaurants, accommodation, shopping, transportation, entertainment and more, from one integrated platform which they can easily pay for via their favourite online travel agency (OTA) or payment gateway.