Tag: Hospitality

Business

Sabah Hospitality Fiesta banks on a lopsided deal

Sabah Insights

When forgoing a million ringgit profit is an opportunity cost

Contestants don’t lack ideas in concocting their best culinary fare.

Trade exhibitions are big money spinners. And so, it surprises that the Sabah and Labuan Chapter of the Malaysian Association of Hotels and ATI College have given up staging their very successful food and beverage exhibition which they launched just last year to Informa Markets, a British firm reputed to be one of the leading organisers of exhibitions. Instead, they have partnered Informa in what looks like a lopsided deal to host the “trade-only” Food and Hospitality Malaysia, Borneo Edition, a very much smaller version of its FHM expo in Kuala Lumpur that brings sellers and buyers together. And in the process MAH-SLC and ATI College handed to Informa about RM1m ($235,000) in profit for hosting the three-day FHM, Borneo Edition, from September 26 to 28 at the Sabah International Convention Centre in Kota Kinabalu. Both MAH-SLC and ATI College have gained nothing more than the free use of one of the three exhibition halls from Informa for their popular Sabah Hospitality Fiesta which is in its 24th year.

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Education

The road less travelled

Sabah Insights

Three girls beat the odds in their tourism studies to come up on top

ATI College’s top students: from left to right: Iman Maryam, Melissa Wong and Nurul Syahanah.

School leavers are at a crossroad when it comes to choosing their careers. Many would take the traditional path: study law, accountancy, medicine, dentistry, engineering or architecture. Some would be happy just to grab the first job that comes along after obtaining their Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (school leaving certificate). But ATI College’s top students Iman Maryam, Melissa Mercedes Wong Thien Eng and Nurul Syahanah binti Annuar have taken the road less travelled and proven themselves right in choosing tourism. It is Sabah’s fourth most important industry contributing about 10 per cent to its gross domestic product (GDP). Tourism earned the state RM13b last year and employs 430,000 people, about a fifth of Sabah’s 1.9m workforce. The hotel and food and beverage industry employs 193,000 people, about half of all tourism employees.

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Tourism

Sabah Hospitality Fiesta mirrors ATI College’s success

Sabah Insights

How one man builds a premier tourism school out of nowhere.

Wong Khen Thau

There was all round scepticism when Wong Khen Thau started Sabah’s first hospitality and tourism school in Kota Kinabalu 27 years ago. The hotel industry didn’t give him a chance to succeed because it thought that he was copying what hotels were already doing: on the job training of their frontline staff. Hoteliers didn’t think that he was offering anything new to the industry. And they were quite right to doubt him because Wong knew little about hotel and catering. He was a school teacher who had turned himself into a businessman selling home appliances. But all was not lost. His Asian Tourism Institute, staffed by a handful of hotel industry experts, received its first batch of 40 students for a six-month certificate course in food and beverage, housekeeping and front office operations – thanks to the sponsorship of then tourism minister Bernard Dompok. And from that small beginning, the Asian Tourism International College, as it is now known, has become the premier tourism and hotel and catering school which has produced more than 12,000 skilled workers for Sabah’s hotel industry, according to Mabel Cheong, the college’s registrar.

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