[ad_1]
PETALING JAYA: DAP Secretary General Lim Guan Eng has questioned Putrajaya’s projections of an average hotel occupancy rate of 58.4% for next year, describing it as an ignorant approach.
Citing statistics released in Parliament, Lim said that around RM100 billion in tourism revenue had been lost this year due to the pandemic, adding that states dependent on tourism had seen many business closures and job losses.
He said the government needed to do more for stakeholders such as tour guides and hoteliers, and said that an industry in such severe economic distress should receive a higher wage subsidy than is currently offered.
“The Ministry of Tourism continues to take an ‘ostrich in the sand’ approach by predicting that the average hotel occupancy for 2020 will be 61.1% and 58.4% in 2021.
“Such false and unrealistic optimistic projections will damage the public’s confidence that the government knows how to do its job to save our tourism industry,” he said in a statement today.
The Minister of Art and Culture of Tourism, Nancy Shukri, had previously clarified that the projection of 61.1% made for 2020 was made in 2019, taking into account the Visit Malaysia 2020 campaign.
Lim said that Pakatan Harapan (PH) had suggested that the unemployed should receive a monthly social assistance of RM1,000, adding that the one-time payments were like band-aids for the unemployed.
“There should be an automatic extension of the bank loan moratorium (excluding for the T20 group), salary incentives of RM 500 and RM 300 hiring each month to create more job opportunities for locals, and an additional RM 10 billion in financial aid for SMEs, especially in the tourism industry. “
Lim said the Perikatan Nasional government needed to come up with a comprehensive tourism survival plan to offset the losses the industry has suffered, adding that a frequent complaint was the difficulty in obtaining loans from banks.
“The tourism industry is the biggest victim of the triple crisis of political instability, economic recession and the Covid-19 pandemic in Malaysia.
“Failure to address the triple crisis has contributed to Malaysia suffering the humiliation of being the first ASEAN country to have Fitch Ratings downgraded our sovereign credit ratings,” he added.
