LANGKAWI: The Langkawi Development Authority (LADA) is targeting three million arrivals to Langkawi this year while talking to various charter and commercial airlines, including India's low-cost carrier IndiGo to attract them to fly to the island.
Lada chief executive officer (CEO) Datuk Haslina Abdul Hamid said the agency welcomed five chartered flights from Chengdu and another five from Chongqing, China this month itself as it sees more foreigners, especially from China and India travelling to Langkawi.
"We just communicated with IndiGo to get them (to fly to Langkawi) because of the government policy on visa," she said, adding that Langkawi has seen an increasing number of travellers from India and China due to the visa policy change.
Haslina was speaking to the media at the Routes Asia hosted by Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd and Tourism Malaysia.
Recently, Malaysia removed visa requirements for Chinese and Indian travellers from Dec 1, 2023 until Dec 31, 2024 to boost the country's tourism industry.
Haslina said Langkawi had welcomed close to 250,000 arrivals in January this year with 48 per cent of the travellers were foreigners.
"Previously the travellers are about 70 per cent local, 30 per cent foreigners but this year starting from January we managed to achieve about 48 per cent of foreigners to Langkawi and that's a good percentage," she added.
Tourism Malaysia director of international promotion (Asean) Mohd Shahrir Mohd Ali said Malaysia expects to register up to five million of arrivals from China this year as the country welcomes more charter flights from China.
"We can see now there's a lot of interested parties, especially from China and India. There's a lot of confirmed charter flights out of China. We're targeting more Chinese (tourists) this year hoping that we can get maybe within three to five million Chinese tourist arrivals," he said.
Mohd Shahrir added that Tourism Malaysia is targeting 27.3 million tourist arrivals in 2024 while last year's arrivals were recorded at about 20.1 million.