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23rd January, 2008
KOTA KINABALU: The verdict is out: Sabah is getting more popular among tourists as their numbers burst the projected figure for last year.
State Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Datuk Masidi Manjun said the number of tourist arrivals last year shot to 2,478,443.
“It has overshot our targeted figure of 2.3 million,” said the delighted Masidi.
The figure showed an increase of 7.8 per cent more than the projected figure. It is 18.5 per cent more than the arrivals in 2006 which saw a record number of 2,091,658 arrivals then.
Masidi said that international arrivals accounted for 987,660, a 31.5 % jump over the 2006 figure of 750,923.
At the same time, there were 1,490,783 domestic arrivals last year, an increase of 11.2 % over the 2006 figure of 1,340,735.
During their holidays and visits including for business, tourism receipts accounted for RM4.72 billion, or 14.76% of the State’s GDP, he added.
Bruneians represented the bulk of visitors with 79,861 compared to 67,464 in 2006 with Koreans in a close second with 76,693 compared to 57,107 in 2006.
And another regular visitor is Taiwanese who accounted for 49,338 compared to 46,578 in 2006.
Recently, Masidi said that during the first 10 month of 2007, there was a growth of 17.4 percent tourists coming to Sabah and by Nov 30 last year, the figure showed a total of 2,186,551 visitors.
Domestic visitor’s growth went up to 10.7 percent.
Of the number of foreigners, he said, Asian countries were the biggest contributing factor in the growth of Sabah tourism industry last year with 753,051 tourists followed by the European with 49,970. There was an increase of 29.5 percent in the growth of foreign visitors with 861,491 people, he added.
With the coming Chinese New Year, Sabah will also be playing hosts to visitors from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan following the allocation of more extra chartered flights.
A number of 4,979 Chinese would fly in by 19 chartered flights followed 1,231 Hong Kong nationals (3) and over 1,000 Taiwanese (6) during the period.
“We are not only targeting the bigger number of tourist arrival but also hope that they will spend more money during their stay here,” Masidi had said.
The Kota Kinabalu International Airport, the second busiest airport in the country is serviced by 304 domestic and 110 international flights per week.
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