Sarawak-Brunei Promote Incoming Tourism From Chinese Tourists

The Sarawak-Brunei bilateral collaboration is expected to help promote incoming tourism from China, particularly from the Hebei and Hubei provinces.

Following a meeting with Consul General of Brunei Darussalam Pengiran Hajah Krtini Binti Pengiran Haji Tahir Assistant, Minister for Land & Air Transporation and Safety and Assistant Minister for Tourism Sarawak Datuk Lee Kim Shin revealed that in China, he has made arrangements with two cities, Shijiazhuang of the Hebei province and Wuhan of the Hubei province.

“These two cities have expressed interest. I met the provincial tourism committee and also the big tour operators, charter flight operators and also the Hebei Airlines.

“In Wuhan, I met the top tourism officials, the Hubei tourism committee and also the Wanda Group, which is the top 10 tourism companies in China and also charter flight operators,” Lee said.

He explained that the people from the provinces are all very keen to fly direct to Miri because the city is not only just next to Kota Kinabalu, but also because they are interested in visiting sea beaches and where there are fishing and diving activities.

“And of course, the other attractions about coming to Miri is going to Brunei. They also expressed the interest that once they come to Miri, they would also like to visit Brunei by road from Miri,” he said.

The Wanda New Airlines International Travel Services will send its product specialist team to Sarawak to see for themselves the various products that will be of interest to Chinese tourists.

The familiarisation trip for the product managers will be scheduled in September covering Kuching and Miri with the hope to prepare for tour packages to be sold for its charter services during the 2017 Chinese New Year.

Lee added that they will also be making a trip to Brunei.

The first charter flights to Miri are being planned to start towards the end of the year, around December.

In addition, they are also looking at Guangzhou-Kuching charter flights as tourists from China are coming to Kuching to celebrate the Chinese New Year.

“The other thing that we will work with Brunei is to have our Sarawak-Brunei joint tourism working committee.

“We are planning to have this joint tourism committee for Brunei sometime in September,” Lee said, adding that this is to discuss some of their joint tourims promotions, cooperation and collaboration especially in terms of the border crossing.

Lee noted that there are tourists in Brunei who are also interested in visiting Miri and other parts of Sarawak, which makes this a tourism bilateral cooperation.

He further noted that the Consul General from Brunei has expressed the wish of the Brunei government to work very closely with Sarawak in the promotion of tourism.

Brunei is in the process of diversifying its economy as it aims to not depend solely on the oil and gas industry and tourism is one of the sectors it has identified to venture into.

“We think that Brunei and Sarawak can work closely on this since we are very close neighboring countries. Brunei has also identified a number of tourism areas in Sarawak that we can establish or develop further,” Krtini said.

The number of visitors from China to Brunei ranked at number four with 31,202 visitors recorded in 2015.

Brunei’s airport has just undergone expansions worth 150 billion Brunei dollars. With this expansion, Krtini expressed that their hope to see the number of visitors increase to six million a year.

Also present at the meeting were officers from the immigration department, the Sarawak Tourism Board and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transporation.