Q&A: Former Secretary General of MATI ‘Sim’ Mohamed Ibrahim

Luke Powell: The Tourism Ministry has put a lot of emphasis on achieving one million tourist arrivals for 2013, how important is this target and is this the right way to go about measuring success in the industry?

Sim Mohamed Ibrahim: There are many ways of measuring tourism. The most important of those measures is in terms of yield, as in what you have left after your expenses. I think there is a big challenge at the moment in this area. Despite resorts being very full, there are a few companies relying on Chinese tourists, and while tourists from China are good in the sense of keeping numbers up, in terms of yield, it’s not good.

It’s very expensive to run the resorts and I think we are not doing as well as we should be. Last year was not so good, we were able to keep the numbers fairly high but they were again mostly Chinese. It’s not really about the numbers, what we should have is average occupancy at good rates, however, we are finding that difficult to maintain as we now have to bring down the rates, offer discounts, and give special prices, to make up for the numbers being down.