The number of Singaporean tourists who visited Malaysia in 2018 fell by 15 percent.

What happened?

Malaysia has failed to hit its tourism numbers target for 2018.

This was revealed by tourism minister Datuk Mohamaddin Ketapi on Wednesday, Feb. 27.

What was the target?

Malaysia is gunning for 30 million tourists a year, which is the goal for Visit Malaysia 2020.

But 2018's results mark the eighth straight year that Malaysia has failed to hit tourist arrival targets, which for 2018 was 26.4 million visitors, according to The Edge.

In 2018, the actual number of visitor arrivals for Malaysia was 25.8 million.

What caused the shortfall?

Malaysia attributed the shortfall to a 15 percent drop in the number of Singaporean tourists, Tourism Malaysia director-general Musa Yusof said, according to The Edge.

Musa added that this could have been due to factors like congestion on the Johor-Singapore Causeway, and Singaporeans’ increasing preference for “new and different” experiences” apart from touring big cities.

How many Singaporeans visited Malaysia in 2018?

In total, 10.62 million visitors from Singapore visited Malaysia in 2018.

If this figure reflected at 15 percent fall, Malaysia was expecting some 12.5 million visitors from Singapore in 2018.

Why are tourists from Singapore important for Malaysia?

Malaysia’s tourism ministry statistics showed that Singapore still accounted for the highest number of visitors to Malaysia in 2018.

Most tourists from Singapore

The 10.62 million tourists is about three times higher than Indonesia’s 3.28 million tourists, which put it in second place.

Implications

Although visitor numbers to Malaysia in 2018 fell compared to 2017, tourism income rose by 2.4 percent to hit RM84.1 billion (S$28 billion), Bernama cited tourism minister Mohamaddin as saying.

Malaysia’s tourism income target for 2020 is RM300 billion (S$100 billion).

Singapore tourism industry in comparison

The Singapore tourism industry had a record year in 2018.

Some 18.5 million visitor arrivals were recorded -- a 6.2 percent increase from 2017.

Malaysia, as mentioned above, received 25.8 million visitors.

Tourists to Singapore spent a projected S$27.1 billion, also a new high and an increase of 1 percent from 2017.

This is roughly similar with Malaysia, where tourists spent some S$28 billion.

Peninsular Malaysia is about 500 times the size of Singapore.