Tourism target possible

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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?