KUCHING: The Tourism Ministry is looking into improving the Tourism Act 1992, says its minister Dato Sri Nancy Shukri.
She said that both the ministry and industry players deserved to have a new brief.
“We are relooking into the future of our tourism now, including our Tourism Act,” she told reporters after the dinner with Tourism, Arts and Culture industry players here last night.
Earlier, she was asked to comment on the budget hotel owners’ call for the government to have some legislation to protect themselves.
On this, she said she was not quite sure if budget hotel is mentioned in the plan, but the Ministry was looking at improving the Tourism Act.
On other matters, Nancy said that based on the ministry’s earlier projection, the tourism sector may be able to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic in the second or third quarter of next year.
“Even then, we thought that we would be going to restart at least by the end of the year but it seems we have started earlier.
“Thank you to our frontliners. Our frontliners have contributed a lot to our early restart by ensuring the people comply with the standard operation procedures (SOP) such as social distancing, hand sanitising and so on,” she added.
Nancy said that for the time being, the ministry was taking a two pronged approach to attract tourists.
She said that first, they wanted to ensure that people were confident with the ‘new normal’, where Malaysia has practised very good procedures among Malaysians.
In terms of strategy, Nancy said that they were focusing on domestic tourism and promoting new tourism products.
In addition, she said that they hoped to open the borders again, especially with some of the Asean countries, by looking at green zone countries that have been allowed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for Malaysia to open her borders and collaborate with.
“At the moment, we have discussed with countries that we have identified for the collaboration as many people can’t wait any more to go for holidays overseas.
“That is why we have to open our border, like our border with Singapore, Brunei and other green zone countries. Actually we have identified the green zone countries, but we have to wait for the green light from them as well,” Nancy said.
She noted that Malaysia could open its doors for foreign tourists, but they had to wait as other states or countries were not opening theirs yet due to their own situation.
“It is not so much that Malaysia does not want to open her doors yet but there needs to be an agreement between both countries on the matter,” she said.
Nancy also believed that it was time for her ministry to help Sarawak, given that the state was left behind in many aspects. She said that Sarawak deserved to be given assistance because Sarawak is a big state and she believed that Sarawak had contributed a lot through its oil and gas resources.
“Sarawak should be given more assistance and we are working together,” she said.