TOURISM Malaysia has posted the latest figures on foreign tourist arrivals on its website. Last year, the total number was 4,332,722, a drop of 83.4% compared with 26,100,784 in 2019. It will take a long time for Malaysia to receive an average of more than two million foreign tourists monthly, as we did in 2019.
I am certain we will not even reach two million for the whole of this year because actual arrivals for nine months last year, from April to December, was only 99,267. If this rate were to be repeated this year, we may get a few hundred thousand foreign tourists – mainly from Brunei, Singapore and Thailand – who can enter Malaysia by road.