MALAYSIA is confident of welcoming 30 million tourists for Visit Malaysia Year (VMY) 2020, if there are no environmental issues like transboundary smoke next year, said Mohamaddin Ketapi.

The Tourism, Arts and Culture Minister said the smoke from forest fires from Indonesia hit tourism receipts slightly in September.

“In September, the smoke affected Malaysia and our neighbours like Brunei, Singapore and Thailand.

“If there was no smoke, then our tourist arrivals would have increased,” he declared at the ministry in Putrajaya today.

He said that with VMY 2020 they are expecting RM100 billion in tourist’s receipts.

This year, he said that tourist arrivals had increased by 3.7% (19.4 million tourists) from January to September, over the same period last year.

He said that the spending from January to September had similarly increased to 6.9% from RM 61.9 billion to RM 66.1 billion.

Mohamaddin said that the bulk of the visitors came from Singapore, Indonesia, China, Thailand, Brunei, India, South Korea.

According to ministry data, the average length of stay increased for visitors from Arab Saudi, the Netherlands, France, the UK and the US.

“The main contributors are from Singapore, China, Indonesia, Thailand and India.”

Mohamaddin also said that the ministry is aggressively promoting VMY 2020.

“We are doing a lot of campaigning and we hope to achieve our targets. – November 26, 2019.