Tourism Malaysia wants mutual promotion ties with Cebu players

Instead of competing to attract worldwide tourists, Malaysia tourism players expressed willingness to work closely with Cebu tourism stakeholders to promote each other's tourism destination.

Although, there was no formal action being made to start off a mutual agreement for tourism promotion between Malaysia and Cebu, Tourism Malaysia deputy director Mirza Mohammad Taiyab said he will be initiating moves to start working with Cebu tourism players for mutual promotion activities.

Taiyab, together with key tourism players in Malaysia recently came to Cebu to hold Tourism Malaysia Road Show and aggressively promote Malaysia to the Cebuano market, as well as the Philippine market to Malaysia in general.

"This is just the start of our move to promote Malaysia very extensively in the Philippines," Taiyab said.

In his talk before the Cebu tourism players, he said that Tourism Malaysia will be starting an active partnership with the tourism players in Cebu, especially the travel agents in order to sell Malaysia to Filipinos, likewise, Malaysian travels agents could also promote Cebu to their country.

Malaysia, with a total of 24 million population, is the second largest tourism receiving country in Asia, despite its success, it continuously spending multi-million dollar to promote Malaysia extensively in the world.

Mirza emphasized that the Filipino market has shown interest to consider Malaysia as one of their preferred tourism destination in Asia. He said with a closer relationship and tie up with tourism players here, there is also a high possibility that Malaysian arrivals to Cebu will increase significantly in the next few years.

He said the air accessibility has open up for Cebu and other cities in Malaysia, this would encourage Malaysians to count on Cebu as their preferred destination.

For this reason he said there is a need also for players here to promote Cebu in Malaysia aggressively.

He said with the total of 15.7 million tourist arrivals in Malaysia last year, the country still has spend more and more to further boost its tourism sector.

"We have to shout louder. We have a lot to offer," Taiyab said.

He added that the concentration of Malaysian travelers are only in Metro Manila, he stressed that Cebu players have to come in strongly to Malaysia to show off Cebu's tourism advantage.



Almost all of Malaysia's tourism attractions are also the Cebu's tourism niches, such as wellness and Spa tourism, wedding and honeymoons, sports tourism (golf), medical tourism, educational tourism.

Taiyab further recommended that Cebu could also position as an incentive destination for Malaysians.

Currently, Malaysia Airlines is flying twice a week from Kuala Lumpur to Cebu and vice versa.