Malaysia needs 50% more rooms for more tourist arrivals, says deputy tourism minister

By Lam Jian Wyn of theedgeproperty.com
Wednesday, 30 March 2011 15:48
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia will need to raise the number of hotel rooms in the country by about 50% to cater for a targeted growth in tourist arrivals to 36 million by 2020, said Deputy Minister of Tourism Datuk Dr James Dawos Mamit.

“We will look at progression (of tourist arrivals). If we have that number of tourists we will need to build that many rooms,” he told reporters on Wednesday, Mar 30.

Mamit said as at February, there were 1,610 hotels nationwide ranked from 3-stars to 5-stars earlier with a total 161,117 rooms, in his speech earlier before the launch of the InterContinental Hotel Kuala Lumpur, formerly the Nikko Hotel.

In the city alone, there were 236 hotels with 30,000 rooms, he added.

“We hope to have enough rooms… Probably (increase by) about 50% more hotel rooms, but by when (we) don’t know, it depends on investors,” he said.

He had noted that the average occupancy rates for hotels across the countries fell by 1.6% to 59.3% in 2010 from a year ago, venturing that tourists are moving towards homestay programmes.

He pointed out that last year, Malacca had recorded the highest number of tourists without offering a figure.