Marketing Malaysia to Middle East tourists: towards a prime inter-regional destination

Abstract

This paper intends to demonstrate the importance of the Middle East market to the Malaysian tourism industry, to discuss their travel profiles and behavior, and eventually to suggest strategies to better position Malaysia as the most preferred inter-regional destination among the Middle East tourists. In the year 2007, a total of 245,302 Arab tourists visited the country contributing to RM1.4 billion in tourism receipts. WTO (2000) estimated that there will be a total of 35 million outbound tourist arrivals from the Middle East in 2020. The Arab tourists tend to stay longer, spend more and are unfazed by the high tropical temperatures. The Middle East region is also a very viable market for tourism as it is home to a growing young population with a high per capita income, particularly the Saudi Arabia and UAE. This paper also discusses the pattern of outbound tourism from the region as well as the marketing efforts undertaken by the Malaysian tourism players to attract the Middle East travelers. Malaysia promotional efforts so far very much concentrated for tourism products and services within the Klang Valley area and tourism players in other parts of the country are still far from the so called "Arab Tourist's Friendly". This paper also elaborates the structure of the tour and travel trading in the Arab world. This paper attempts to contribute to better understanding of the Arab tourists as published information on their travel behavior is hardly found. Finally, among others it is suggested that Malaysia should focus more of their marketing efforts to well capture the Saudi Arabia and UAE outbound travel, to develop distinctive youth-oriented tourism products, to increase air links between major tourist cities in Malaysia and the Middle East, to start fully utilize the internet media for promotion and distribution, and to encourage the Arabs to purchase timeshare vacation homes in Malaysia.