Malaysia launches MyFest 2015

NAY PYI TAW  Following on from its successful Visit Malaysia Year 2014 campaign, Malaysia launched MyFest 2015, Wednesday, at the ASEAN Tourism Forum.
Malaysia Tourism Promotion Board director general, Dato Mirza Mohammad Taiyab, announced details of the campaign during an ATF media briefing.
“Now we move forward with MyFest,” he said. “ This festival year brings local councils and states together to identify events. MyFest gives them a boost. It provides information to front-line travel sellers and creates awareness and renewal.”
The country’s has set a target of 36 million tourist arrivals for 2020. In 2015, the MyFest campaign with its tagline “Endless Celebrations” is expected to push arrivals to 29.4 million and earnings to around MYR89 billion.
Inside no2“We cannot get there without a booster… we managed to get growth from the Visit Year, which helped despite the problems we faced in 2014,” he said.
Two theme years in a row is an exception, he said, while acknowledging the Visit Malaysia campaign helped to shore up arrivals during a crisis, a reference to two accidents involving Malaysia Airlines.
MyFest highlights 50 cultural events and festivals around the country. The country invests around MYR50 million a year on promotions and advertising for its themed programmes.
“We are the most active player in the global advertising scene, the director general commented. “USA has its movie industry to do the job. We are small country; we have to spend USD50 million a year to build awareness.”
Preliminary tourism data for January to October, 2014, confirmed Malaysia welcomed 22.8 million visitors representing a growth of 9.6%.
The top 10 generating markets were: Singapore (11.5 million); Indonesia (2.3 million); China (1.3 million); Thailand (1.1 million); Brunei (985,111); India (643,335); Philippines (513,313); Australia (479,829); Japan (460,774) and the UK (377,208).
In other news, Malaysia will take the lead on behalf of ASEAN member countries to establish the GoASEAN TV Channel that will promote tourism packages for the 10-country group. It will start this April by airing travel shows on Malaysia and expand quickly to include travel packages for all the 10 countries.

sourced:ttrweekly.com