Malaysia willing to share tourism expertise

With the huge volume of tourists that Malaysia hosts each year, the latest figure in 2007 pegged at 20 million, the country is willing to share their expertise to other neighboring countries insofar as tourism related services is concerned.

Malaysia Consul General to Davao Hon. Nik Mustafa Kamal Nik Ahmad in an interview at the Club 888 Forum of the Marco Polo Davao said projects like exchange studies would allow students to have wider exposure to the international tourism industry.

He said the Filipino trainees while in their country must work hard because the Malaysian and other tourists there love to dine and all hotels and restaurants are open 24 hours and their long exposure would make them more skilled as they would interact with tourists of different nationalities.

Malaysia is among the top 3 destinations in Asia and tourism industry workers will be exposed among others to clients in the Middle East.

"With more exposure they will have the good chance of increasing their marketability," he said.

Meanwhile he observed that there is not enough Malaysian coming to Mindanao because of their impression that the island is dangerous.

They (Malaysian) do not even know that there is a consulate base in Davao City even as he said that their government has not issued travel advisories banning their nationals to come to Mindanao.

"Issuing travel advisory is unfair and we do not want to do that to our neighbor," he said.

The other concern aired there number of people coming to Manila instead to Davao because of the lack of air linkages.

It is a good thing that Cebu Pacific had started the route and hopefully there would be more Malaysians traveling here because they love to travel and when they travel they want to go to several destinations.

He said tourists destinations here are really beautiful and has rich resources but it needs a lot of promotion.

The sites are comparable to places in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand only that it was not extensively promoted and there are a lot of untouched destinations here worth exploring.

Nightlife, shopping pushed as Davao City come-on

Key players in the tourism industry of Davao are considering the city's healthy nightlife and shopping centers as the destinations that they will push for promoting the city. They thought of this package in order not to compete with the destinations being promoted by its neighbors in the BIMP EAGA region and these activities will purely be wholesome even as tourism players stick to their vision of promoting mainly family entertainment.

There are activities at night in the city that promotes the culture and music referring to the Taboan at Matina Town Square, Jack's Ridge and other organized events in places like The Venue and in several hotels of the city.

The People's Park at night is in itself a destination and it is already included in the package that the travel agencies had designed.

The tour packages that these operators want their visitors to experience would include the malls as a must see destinations as many visitors would love shopping. The packages are redesigned to complement that of Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.

I think it is high time that tourism leaders rethink of now strategies inorder to improve traffic of visitors here considering that a lot of beautiful sites both in the island and highland that are comparable if not more beautiful than in other parts of the world.