Hyderabad: Tourism Malaysia and Malaysian Association of Tour and Travel Agents (MATTA) recently organised its Sales Mission to Hyderabad to increase the arrivals from South India.

 India features among the top 6 contributing markets to Malaysia Tourism with a significant number of tourists arriving from South India. The Sales Mission to South India comprises Malaysian delegation of 15 travel agents, 2 hotels, 3 theme parks and Tourism Malaysia officials. Malaysia Airlines, Air Asia and Malindo Air also extended their support by participating in this event and ensuring the flight routes to Malaysia are being offered in the local markets. The sales mission saw an enthusiastic exchange of ideas and information between the Malaysian delegation and the Indian counterparts.

 Since the beginning of this year, MATTA has been looking into aggressive overseas promotion through sales missions, trade shows, hosting overseas travel agents and online marketing influencers to create awareness of local destinations in Malaysia and other business opportunities.

At present there are over 230 weekly flights offering more than 41,000 seats from India to Malaysia. The expected launch of flights by Indigo from Bengaluru and Delhi to Kuala Lumpur with 1260 seats per week will add to the connectivity to Malaysia.

As part of its efforts to ease travel to Malaysia, the Malaysian government has introduced  the e-visa facility (https://www.windowmalaysia.my) for Indians which is hassle free with no physical submission of documents and is valid for multiple & single journey to Malaysia for purposes of tourism trips for the maximum of 30 days. The country expects to welcome over a million Indian tourists by 2020.