Tag: Hotels

Business

Hajiji’s TAED dilemma

Sabah Insights

After 10 years, a grandiose playground for the super-rich remains in limbo

An artist’s impression of the Tanjung Aru Eco Development project.
Hajiji Noor

It was to have rivaled Bali. But Sabah’s grandiose multi-billion-ringgit playground for the super-rich at Tanjung Aru beach never took off. The two-km long beach is reputed to be one of the world’s best offering spectacular sunrise and sunset. Launched by former chief minister Musa Aman in 2013 during a ground-breaking ceremony, the project has stalled because of objections from the public and environmentalists over a massive land reclamation plan, sales of the reclaimed land, and doubts over public access to the beach. And after 10 years, the project remains in limbo as the vagaries of politics have dampened investors’ interest. Now chief minister Hajiji Noor has given the Tanjung Aru Eco Development (TAED) which would have then cost RM7.1 billion a glimmer of hope.

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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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