I WAS on the phone with a hotelier, who generously sent me a buka puasa package as part of his effort to spread the joy of Ramadan from the hotel, which his company purchased late last year.
However, I didn't want to ask how his hotel was faring during this Covid-19 period. It'd be inappropriate to do so after news portals, quoting the Malaysian Hotels Association, reported that almost 60 per cent of hotel businesses countrywide would be affected by the pandemic by year end.
Scores of hotels are temporarily closed and some smaller hotels have shut down their operations permanently.
The saddest thing is that many employees in the industry find themselves on the street when their employers can no longer pay their salaries.
Across the globe, the World Travel and Tourism Council has highlighted that the spillover effects on global employment due to the pandemic have been wide-reaching as global travels and the tourism industry stall.
A total of 330 million jobs are supported by this industry around the world, contributing 10 per cent, or US$8.9 trillion, to the global gross domestic product each year. Hotels are part and parcel of the burgeoning tourism industry, but now the accommodation business looks bleak, including those small enterprises operating budget hotels and homestays.
And everyone knows that this year is supposed to be our significant year for tourism. Leveraging the "Malaysia, Truly Asia" slogan, we're supposed to reposition the nation as a premier location for international travel in the region.
Unfortunately, that didn't happen as planned. Instead, what came was Covid-19. Thousands of people across the country have been infected and more than 100 have died since March.
The game plan in this highly publicised Visit Malaysia Year 2020 is to chart a sterling growth, targeting 36 million in tourist arrivals and RM168 billion in tourist receipts by year end.
Since the launch of its strategic roadmap called the Integrated Promotional Plan in 2018, Tourism Malaysia had begun executing action plans by working closely with local, as well as international partners, and stakeholders to ensure the plans achieved the desired success.
However, it now appears that the money spent on infrastructure and integrated marketing and promotional campaigns didn't quite serve its purpose when the virus came into existence. The Covid-19 pandemic has put a damper on all of this, particularly affecting the more than 3.5 million people working in the tourism industry.
The way forward is for Tourism Malaysia to aggressively promote domestic tourism once the government relaxes the Movement Control Order, or when the danger of Covid-19 is less threatening. There is so much potential in domestic tourism that needs to be tapped into.
Frankly speaking, if we were to wait for the pandemic to die down, this revenue-generating industry will suffer even more losses. But, really, how long more?
Tourism Malaysia director-general Datuk Musa Yusof told a webinar called Tourism Virtual Summit on April 7 that Tourism Malaysia's priority was to refocus on domestic tourism to increase demand for travel trade and related services, including airlines, accommodation, land transport, retail, as well as food and beverage.
It's reassuring to know that Tourism Malaysia will be organising familiarisation trips for key opinion leaders and media outlets specialising in niche segments that show promising growth such as sports tourism, agrotourism and health tourism.
Since domestic tourism is poised to play an important role in the industry's recovery, efforts are underway to encourage Malaysians to travel locally after the crisis to boost the economy. Hence, it's good to see the hashtag #TravelLater by the Malaysian Tourist Board in its social media posts.
Since it may take months for the tourism industry to recover from the effects of Covid-19, it needs all the help it can get to refocus, reinvent and rebuild.
C'est la vie.
**The writer, a former NST journalist, is now a film scriptwriter whose penchant is finding new food haunts in the country