PUTRAJAYA, MAY 29 — The Tourism Ministry is expecting a further increase in tourists from Singapore to Malaysia once the issues surrounding the entry points have been rectified.
Tourism secretary-general Datuk Isham Ishak said the number of Singaporean tourists has been affected since November last year due to the issues.
“Currently, tourists coming into Malaysia have to queue in the same line with workers coming back into the country, which is an inconvenience for them,” he said during the press conference on Malaysia’s tourism performance for the first quarter of 2019.
Isham said the Immigration Department is currently working to allow tourists and workers to queue up in their respective lines, making the entrance process into Malaysia much smoother and less of a hassle.
“They should be done sometime in October, to which the ministry expects a further increase of Singaporean tourists as a result,” he said.
From January to March this year, 2,626,125 Singaporeans entered the country for tourism-related purposes. This is in comparison to 2,667,468 tourists during the same period last year.
Singaporeans were also the biggest spenders among Asean tourists to Malaysia for the first quarter of the year, whose main expenditure per capita reached up to RM6.2 billion.
