A record RM13b tourism revenue despite sluggish growth last year
A new method of accounting for tourism has yielded a set of surprising figures. The inaugural Sabah tourism satellite account (TSA) released last week by the Sabah tourism ministry in Kota Kinabalu shows that tourism earned the state an all-time high of RM13b. This is despite a relatively sluggish recovery last year after two years of travel ban because of the Covid-19 pandemic. And it contrasts sharply with the RM9b earned in 2019 when the number of visitors to the state was the highest at 4.2m against a low 1.7m last year. The reason for this “discrepancy” is in the way tourism is defined and measured in the TSA prepared by the Sabah Tourism Board and Malaysia’s Department of Statistics.
Sabah Insights 