The tourism industry needs to leverage on new technology to attract more visitors, says Galasys PLC chief executive officer Sean Seah.
Malaysia-based Galasys PLC is a provider of integrated amusement park solutions and services in Asia. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange.
“As consumers get more savvy, the tourism industry needs to leverage on new technology to revamp the traditional approaches to attract them.
“There is a marked rise in the investment in digital channels and computerisation amongst Asia theme park operators.
“However, on the Malaysian front, investment has been rather slow due to the new GST and weaker currency,” said Seah.
According to Tourism Malaysia, tourists numbers dropped 9.4% between January and June this year.
A total of 12,567,300 million foreign visitors were recorded in the first half of this year compared to 13.875.046 in the same period in 2014.
Tourist arrivals from China fell 28.5% to 380,000 tourists in the first quarter of 2015.
Among the worst-hit were arrivals from China, which fell from 520,400 from January to March last year to 380,000 (-28.5%) in the same period this year.
The average China tourist rarely travels beyond Kuala Lumpur, Genting and Malacca. This can be attributed to the language barrier and lack of a convenient method to book packages across the country.
In order to stand out in the region, the country’s tourism industry needs to look into changing the way it promotes Malaysia to the world.
While tourism advertisements may have been successful in the past, it seems to be less effective with today’s Internet driven tourist, said Seah.
For a long time, tourism was a major sector for Malaysia’s economy.
However, Seah said the situation has deteriorated in recent years.
“But the fact that Galasys, as a provider of tourism-related technology solutions, is doing well, shows there is a lot of potential in the market,” he said.
In 2015, Galasys launched its Intelligent Tourism Cloud Marketing Platform (ITCMP) which integrates big-data analytics to allow tourists in China to pick and choose attractions, restaurants, accommodation, transportation, shopping, entertainment and more from one integrated platform They can pay for it via an online travel agency (OTA) such as C-Trip or payment gateway such as Alipay.
Yangzhou, China is the first district that deployed ITCMP and has successfully attracted millions of tourists on free-n-easy trips.
Xinjiang, China is the second district to use the platform, which now has over 500,000 subscribers in the country through Galasys collaborations with Alitrip, C-Trip, Tuniu, and more.
Galasys is planning to invest and deploy this ITCMP in Malaysia and other cities in Asia.
Galasys was also recently selected to be part of Multimedia Development Corporation’s Global Acceleration Innovation Network programme that aims to escalate the growth rate of these companies.
“We were recently part of a networking trip to Silicon Valley in the United States.
“We hope to collaborate with Malaysian tourism authorities as well as local operators to adopt the right Internet and social media solutions so that the local tourism sector doesn’t lose out even more to other Asian countries,” Seah said.
Galasys also recently announced a 43% increase in revenue for the first half of 2015 at RM23.48mil compared to RM16.44mil in the same period last year.
“2015 has been an excellent year for Galasys as we signed a few significant deals with operators in China, the Philippines and Malaysia,” he said.
Source: http://www.thestar.com.my/metro/smebiz/news/2016/01/04/taking-tourism-up-a-notch-industry-can-flourish-with-help-of-new-technology-says-service-provider/, 4 Jan 2016
