PETALING JAYA, April 10 — As many as 30,000 Chinese tourists have cancelled trips they had planned to Malaysia after the bad press surrounding the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, Tourism Minister Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz said today.

The dwindling numbers of Chinese tourists is expected to dent Malaysia’s tourism sector. Over 1.6 million Chinese tourists visited Malaysia last year.

“I have been made to understand that as many as 30,000 tourists from China have cancelled their holiday packages to Malaysia until 2015.

“That is why I mentioned earlier that the tourism sector has been affected.

“The figures for January and February are extremely good but I have not received the figures for tourism arrivals after March 8,” Nazri told reporters here.

Malaysia’s tourism ministry has postponed all promotions for the Visit Malaysia Year 2014 campaign as a mark of respect for the air tragedy.

Last year, tourists from China made up the third largest group after Singapore and Indonesia.

Flight MH370 left the KL International Airport at 12.41am on March 8 and failed to reappear on the Vietnamese radar less than an hour after it took off. It was supposed to arrive in Beijing at 6.30am on the same day.

On March 24, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced that the flight path of the Boeing 777-200ER aircraft “ended in the southern Indian Ocean”.

The search for MH370 continues.