Wednesday 19 September 2007

If you get lucky

I am surprised. There was this new video that I saw but I am not sure whether it was done by the state or by an invidual that loves Kuching. Its amazing as if it is done by an individual who is not related to promoting Kuching, Bravo for you. you got it right by showing St Joseph Cathedral, DBKU, the airport, Panggung Udara etc.

If it is done by the state, there is a big problem. There was not a human activity that you could find in the video. Does this mean no one is supposed to utilise the facilities in the video? No tourists, no locals ... are we promoting the facilities and at the same time saying to the people we dont want anyone to use them, just enjoy the video ... and if you are in Kuching, you can just be a voyeur?

Try and you tube through the videos and find this video. Its a great way to experience a vacuum situation within Kuching. If you get lucky, the video is at the bottom of the video collections on this blog.

Pura ... when I was younger, I watched Saphire and Steel ... and I felt the same way when I watched this video tho.

Tourism target possible

click here for the article

Hooray for all. First there was a tension on who would be responsible to fly out citizens and tourists to rural areas of Sabah and Sarawak. Then, it was FAX ... and suddenly MAS decided to make a come back, and now ... Aiport Tax etc are waived. Whats next. I mean, this is really great for the tourism industry as well as Sabahans and Sarawakians.

Funny how many things turn out. Politically and economic driven with endless lobbying by the industry and perhaps the state tourism organisations such as STPC and STB.

Funny as it may be, I hope that we are going on the right track. I am no expert in this but at least we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

However, I am just confused to how these organisations, STB, STPC or even Tourism Malaysia get their inspirations from. I am sure that there was no little birdies that flew to their CEOs and the DG to tell them, look next year there will be more Indians trying to get out of India or Americans wanting to see the orang Utans.

Is there a secret recipe to know how do they determine which market they want to target? Is there an intelligence unit such as CIA or FBI kind of organisations that inject information to their brains? If and only if they use the same intelligence report, would this not make everyone in the world, especially the regional areas such as Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia targeting the same market?

Are we the leader in this region when it comes to wooing tourists? If for example Singapore is the hub of transportation in ASEAN region, how much percentage do we get from them? I was amazed by the fact that some of the fellow tourists that I met while I was in Singapore a few days ago who told me that they have been to Malaysia by just crossing the straits of Johore. Is Johore Bharu representing Malaysia and how good does the city represent us? The best part was, there was a survey done by a scholar to find out whether or not tourists can point out Singapore on a map and 73% of these tourists fingered the Malay Peninsula. The best was when there were asked to pin point Malaysia and they fingered Singapore as Malaysia.

Where did we go wrong in this?

If for example, Singapore says that they want more flights getting into Changi and obviously they have (compared to Kuala Lumpur and of course if we compare with this Kuching or Kota Kinabalu, we are just germs), they could even get Qantas in with waiving the landing fees etc. How come we cant get more airlines coming in?

How many airlines do we get coming into KLIA and other international airports whithin Malaysia. I guess just by having one foreign airline coming into one airport makes our airports International.

Pura - am I local?

Sunday 16 September 2007

My humble Suggestion .... MICROmarketing

I feel really bad about this ... but I was thinking ... perhaps I want to share my views with the rest of the world ...

Where shall I start. Ok ... I was a student ... decades ago and the problem about me and some of my friends was that no body knows where Malaysia was. Thanks to the new technology such as this and a lot of awareness among our leaders, the feeling of not knowing has changed.

However, as Malaysians, either being sent by the government or using FAMA as their sponsors, will be having problems with getting brochures from home to tell their friends about our country. I remembered about micro bankings. Lets take a while to understand this ... just to make us feel good about it.

We are now talking about MICRO marketing. Using our students and Malaysians abroad to assist tourism development in Malaysia. Having one or two or more offices in one country may not do the trick. We have our embassies in places where we have never heard of and they have the list of Malaysians residing, studying in these countries which we can use to help telling people about Malaysia.

Imagine, if we have 1000 students in the UK. If they are registered, this means that we have 1000 representatives of promoters for our country. If we have only 10 people working for our London office in Trafalgar Square, imagine how much boost it is for our nation if we can add another 1000 workforce to our nation.

These students do not need to work like our officers at London Office. When ever they have a party, school visits etc, they can take out some of the brochures from Tourism Malaysia and give them out to their friends, their teachers etc.

Hold on a minute ... can I get this patented? He he he .. MICRO marketing ... is a new thing now .. and I need someone to tell the ministry about it. HELP me.

Pura - whats next ... MICRO wave?

Changes considered for more aggressive tourism promotion

Article

There are things that our current Tourism Minister decides which hits the nail on the head.

There are many tourism offices around the world. Do you think that they are doing their work to promote our country? I have been to some, and to be fair ... some do really do their work and I think that some just waste our tax payers money. I do not want to name which offices .. as this may be a bit too much for this light reading materials.

Anyway, I am all for it Tengku Adnan. Look at your statistics if you may and inform us whether those particular offices are making profits for our country. Congratulations on our campaigns for VMY2007, you can really see the differences in some of the cable satelite televisions on Malaysia Tourism Campaign. I really do feel proud of watching the adverts. Still, when it comes to the weather forecast, a puny country such as Singapore gets the spotlight more, by mentioning the temperature, and the list goes on to Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila and never Kuala Lumpur. Oh well, I guess we need to lobby some of these channels to be fair.

Its a little bit difficult to understand things though. Here we have a tourism office in Milan where there was never a flight that flights direct to Kuala Lumpur or any other destinations in Malaysia. How on earth is Milan going to justify our existence? Hmmmm. And why do we need to put our embassies very much apart in its location than that of Tourism Malaysia? Perhaps ... its helping out the Tourism Office in Milan ... but I am not sure whether thats what is happening.

I think, Tourism Malaysia and Malaysia Airlines should have their own offices located in the same building. What the heck, why dont we have our embassy office in the same building too? To make it more uncomfortable, why dont we have our MITI offices at the same place. Make it a Malaysian kampung? One centre where you cacn get almost anything you wish to have about Malaysia under one roof. That would be nice .. wouldnt it ?

Pura - we are one ... but are we UNITED?

Friday 14 September 2007

Sarawak Regatta revs up for finale

Now ... the question on sustainable tourism ... or green or river tourism .. and we get Sarawak Regatta.

Will there be a chance for our nation to have two sets of events at the same time. For example, love our river campaign and Sarawak Regatta at the same time. Or perhaps, the earth day and Borneo Challenge coincide with each other.

Will that hurt anyone? Will it hurt us? Will it hurt the jungles?

Just for a change, lets do something right.

Pura - the future is bright .. the future is ....

Pitcher plant exports increased

Dont you think that pitcher plants are for profits or do you prefer it to be controlled as part of our heritage ?

Sustainable tourism? I thought I said something about it in the previous segment. This is great .. now I can understand the part where the Tourism Minister wanted to create a shopping area for tourists to buy natural products either in the National Parks or even export them throughout the world.

This is just great.

Pura - anyone wants to sell belacan? shhhhhhh

Tourism set to stay a star performer

The star website

Malaysians beware. Tourism is here and its going to stay here forever. Despite our investments in other industries such as agriculture and heavy industries, tourism is slowly being recognised by the country to perform and out perform other industries.

Do we need more hotels? Do we need more airlines coming into Malaysia? Do we need more travel agents and tour guides? The answers are right at our faces and we have to deal with them directly and strategically. We just can't wait for another country to proceed with their events and we follow. We do have to be the leader in this.

Will we have to learn from Thai to create Visit Malaysia Year, retrospectively? Do we need to imitate the Thais for our Pesta Air. Do we need to the same with our Rainforest World Music Festival for Wombat in Singapore? Oh ... what about the Jazz Festival in Miri, which was initially done in Kuching just because of we have the Java Jazz? Mmmmm shall I try and think a bit harder just to show how we are plagiarising our industry?

I am afraid that Malaysians for now, has been learning from our friendly neighbours too much just in case ... if we were the followers, we do not have to dwell in the mistakes (if any) of our neighbours. I don't think that we like to take risks. And even if we do take risks, we employ our western counterparts for help and tell us what to do (this is after we have our 50 years of independence)... I am very sure that makes us at par with the westerners.

I remembered when KLIA was opened the very first time, a decade ago. We were supposedly have the best range of technical and computer assisted airports surpassing our neighbours such as Changi. I was one of the victims though. It took KLIA staff 45 minutes to get the bridge of the terminal in line with the mouth of the aircraft door. We can buy technology, we do buy our experts ... what about training our citizens on the technical part too. Well, KLIA has improved a lot but ... then comes Survanabumi .... bigger ...

Pura - I think i can be an elephant ... but people around me could only see the germs on the other side of the sea. DUH

3-in-1 tourism plan for Borneo

The news clip: click here

This is great! But this idea of getting Borneo as 1 is not something new. It has been in the so called plan for the past decade. Do you think it will work? Suprisingly, this 4th Borneo International Tourism Conference was actually called something else before this. The best part, they only give opportunities for the outside world to tell us what to do rather than asking what our industry wants.

The speakers were great. One particular tourism expert has been asked to say a few words of wisdom since the very first time we had this conference. I wonder if we have to continue paying a lof of money for this tourism expert guy to help us with our industry. Did we get anything new from our so called experts? Are we prepared to activate the knowledge of all these experts into reality? When will be the right appropriate time for us to reinforce our guts and make what ever these experts said happened?

I am not sure whether the word Borneo only entails Brunei, Sabah and Sarawak. What will happen to Kalimantan as it is considerably bigger in size but was not mentioned in this tourism campaign. Has there been a new development where Indonesia backed out on this, THAT ... I am not very sure.

Perhaps, the one reason why this Borneo campaign has not been realised is the changing of CEOs and ministers and who ever is in power. If these administrators are given a longer term, perhaps we can see some improvements in the industry.

Pura - still in my dreams ... please wake me up !!!

Tengku Adnan: Focus will be on sustainable tourism

click this www.

Sometimes I wonder if the person in charge of our industry do truly understand what sustainable tourism is all about. People who we entrust comes in with things like ecotourism, ecobiotourism, greentourism, or sustainable tourism etc as a means of promoting tourism in our country.

I am surprised .... we were given different views or knowledge on what sustainable tourism is all about. Its about trying to create a maximum experience among our tourists on our assets (beach, monsoon, rainforest, mountains, jungles) and minimising the impacts of these activities to the environment. Thats just a basic understanding of green tourism and with the statement done by our minister of tourism, what will be happening to the environment.

It is not something that we have to take for granted. We are talking about our children's opportunity to experience what we are experiencing now. No joke. Or if it is, perhaps we are maximising the risks of not having anything that we can SELL in the future. There will never be another Pulau Sipadan, if there will be one, it will be a rotten egg if we keep on promoting Pulau Sipadan for tourists. Do we need more people to go to these sensitive places just because we can get more money or do we want to create more money and put a premium to our destinations?

I am surprised ... we are going to turn this destinations into shopping areas? Sustainable ? where can I start.

I can go on and on about this. Tourism is good ... but ... we need to think what we are going to do to them ... its for our own sake.

PuraKelana - hmmmm is this heaven ?

Monday 10 September 2007

Introduction

I may well not start a blog if I don't think I can manage my time well enough to be in here. I have tried many blogs before. I think its about all self discipline and self determination on whether or not my blogs can be of any inspiration for certain people to feel what I am writing.

I will try and put my experience as a traveler, my past knowledge as visitor to many places and look at how I think about tourism and the people that runs tourism.

I hope its all good now. Pray for me to deliver from my heart.