HOW IT WORKS: Dorge (second right) and Kho (far right) are showing Talib (centre) how to search for the Online Travel Fair website on the portable gadget while Pahon (third left), Rashid (second left) and Jamilah (far left) look on. — Photo by Jeffrey Mostapa
KUCHING: The one-month Online Travel Fair will start tomorrow and end on June 30 with attractive packages and fares from some 400 airlines, over 120,000 hotels worldwide and some 500,000 tour packages.
The Online Travel Fair organised by Borneo Post Online and “powered” by AsiaTourismAlliance.com was launched at Sarawak Economic Development Corporation (SEDC) yesterday.
According to the head of Borneo Post Online Dorge Rajah, the online travel fair would be the first of its kind in East Malaysia.
“Going online for anything is almost becoming second nature for many of us Malaysians, needless to say travellers. From air tickets to hotel bookings, shoppers are going online more and more as it has become the more convenient option,” said Dorge.
When AsiaTourismAlliance.com was launched last December, they wanted to test web response to online travel enquiries through Borneo Post Online and therefore, an alliance was then formed with a linkup to the booking engine from the website, he disclosed.
“The link-up yielded encouraging results with 10,000 unique visitors to AsiaTourismAlliance.com throughout Malaysia and around the globe. This response led the idea to us organising an Online Travel Fair which is powered or driven by AsiaTourismAlliance.com,” he explained.
Borneo Post Online is a relatively young news portal and currently the largest homegrown English news site in Borneo. It has a global outreach with some 250,000 hits daily with half of these being Malaysians.
President of Asia Tourism Alliance Sdn Bhd, Kho Sze Min said: “Since we launched AsiaTourismAlliance.com on Nov 19 last year, we have seen a steady trend of visitors from around the world thanks to the strategic partnership with Borneo Post Online for allowing us to ride on its platform and letting us to reach out to the global audiences.”
Kho added again that they will continue to use this platform to promote Sarawak in particular to the global market as they believe tourism is a two-way traffic, where ATA does not only encouraging others to visit the country, but also to visit them thereby creating an informal relationship with mutual benefits.
Apart from that, AsiaTourismAlliance.com (ATA) is an online travel platform set up to work with major regional online travel partners, with a good working relationship with AsiaTravel.com based in Singapore since the launch of the Cobrand partnership in December 2012.
Among the guests who attended the soft launch were Assistant Tourism Minister cum chairman of SEDC Datuk Talib Zulpilip, Sarawak Tourism Board CEO Dato’ Rashid Khan, Ministry of Tourism Sarawak permanent secretary Datu Ik Pahon Joyik and Asia Tourism Alliance Sdn Bhd executive vice-chairman and COO Jamilah Shukri.