Rebuilding Tourism for the Future

[Music] hello and very warm welcome to everyone thank you very much for taking out your time to joining us on tonight's webinar on rebuilding tourism for the future hosted by pinang institute my name is negin and i will be the moderator for this session as we all know it tourism has been one of the sector's hardest hit by the pandemic and the outlook remains highly uncertain international tourism ground to a halt as countries close their borders and restricted trouble to control their spirit of the virus while domestic tourism saw a significant drop as a result of the movement control orders encouraging news on vaccination rates has boosted hopes for recovery but challenges remain although flexible policy solutions may enable the tourism sector to function alongside the virus in the short to medium term it is important to look beyond this to see how the crisis has revealed gaps in government and industry preparedness and response capacity what are lessons learned for the travel and tourism sector from the pandemic that can help to rebuild the tourism industry in p9 how can we build a more sustainable and resilient tourism sector to answer these questions i am delighted to welcome tonight three experts we will first hear some introductory remarks and a statistical overview of the penance tourism industry from miss young pedro from penang institute followed by a panel discussion where we will have miss oy grip link from ogl consultancy and miss catherine draw from the association of tourism attractions p9 to give us some insights on lessons learned for the travel and tourism sector from the pandemic and how to rethink and rebuild tourism for the future they will then have a q a session for about 25 minutes so please submit your questions and suggestions of ideas at any time in the comment section we will discuss them at the end of the session let me introduce our first distinguished speaker miss young pedro miss miss young is a senior analyst with the social economics and statistics department at penang institute she graduated from the university of melbourne with a double degree in arts psychology and political science and commerce economics continuing on to obtain her master in business economics from swinburne university of technology her main research work revolves around gender issues minority marginalization poverty and socio-economic issues in development pedron over to you okay thank you so much nagin for the introduction good evening everyone uh thank you for taking out your time tonight to join us on this webinar discussing on how to rebuild tourism so as we all know i think the pandemic has really brought unparalleled losses and challenges upon the industry a situation that the industry have basically never encountered before even the sas epidemic with a mere drop in the ocean compared to what the industry is facing today so for my part in the webinar today i'm just going to present a statistical overview um basically giving some numbers to put into context of the losses that have suffered by the industry um since the onset of the kovid 19 pandemic so the research work in my presentation i was also was also to the credit of dr lisuming my colleague who worked together with me on this issue sorry just one second okay so um on the outline of my presentation today so firstly i will be talking about the impact on the tourism workforce and then moving on then we will see some numbers of tourist arrivals and departures at the penang international airport and then i'll touch a little bit about the impact on the hotel industry followed followed by impacts on the domestic tourism and then we'll talk also about the impacts on two of the biggest uh contributors uh to finance tourism industry which would be medical tourism and mice tourism which is meetings incentives conferences and exhibitions and i'll end with a little bit of presentation on heritage tourism and equal tourism which would hopefully lead on to our next panel panelists in their panel discussion okay first on the tourism workforce so i think it's unsurprising that tourism workers have faced um retrenchment unemployment and most of them have been put on forest leave which can be paid leave partial paid partially paid leave or unpaid leave ever since the pandemic began last year so job street did a survey in september last year that actually found out that 63 percent of the total tourism workers in malaysia were not working at the time of their survey or they are permanently retrenched so more than 60 percent of these workers work in accommodation hospitality and food and beverage so for banan um we tried to gauge the numbers affected by the latest available data so the latest available data on the tourism workforce we have is from 2015 so that's from the economic census published in 2016 and then we assume we made the assumption that the tourism workforce would not be significantly too different in terms of numbers so overall tourism workers um are 53.8 of the total workers in finance uh services sector okay so potentially affected so we are looking at 39 of workers in retail trade and 35.6 percent workers in food and beverage services so these two sectors uh are the sectors with the biggest percentage of workers affected since the pandemic and also country-specific tourism services 11.4 percent and accommodation and hospitality at 8.8 percent are also

assumed to be considerably affected so we also look a little bit more recent data so we obtained that from the labor force survey which was published this year there are 69 100 workers in accommodation and food and beverage services where more than 4 000 workers are in the hotel industry other than that we also managed to obtain the data that there are 1 66 licensed city guides as well as nature guides that are affected and then they would have seen significant loss of income as they also work when their art was in town so when they are not worse there are no twists for them to lead there will be zero income for this group of guides and additionally we know that um trisha paddlers are also quite ingrained in the panel tourism sector especially in the area of the unesco georgia heritage uh the heritage center so then you we will see hundred and twenty approximately hundred and twenty treasury paddlers will be severely affected and we do know that these groups are also very dependent on tourism income okay moving on uh just to let everyone see the passenger or tourist movement at the international airport so we know that pathetic movement does not necessarily mean all of them are tourist movement but a lot of them would be tourist movement so looking at uh looking at the chart we can see the international arrival started to taper off in february 2020 that's just before uh the movement control order was announced so overall if we look at a year-on-year comparison for march domestic passenger movement reduced by 61.6 and international movement reduced by 74.5 as a quarter one overall on a year-on-year comparison domestic tourism was down by 25 domestic arrivals sorry was down by 25.7 percent where else international movement is down by 37.8 and then from there on we can see a drastic drop in uh quarter two onwards so we can see for especially for international arrivals we are basically nearing uh nearly a hundred percent reduction and that's not surprising because international borders are shut so this will be this will remain stagnant as long as the international borders are not open where else for domestic movement we can see intermittently there are increases in passenger movement but at the same time when the smallest decrease is at 79.1 percent

negative growth so that's also quite severe in terms of the loss of domestic movement at the international airport moving on so just to touch a little bit about the impact on the hotel industry so since the onset of the pandemic we have seen nine hotels in penang announcing their closures and among them we have equatorial and um holiday inn resort which really have been long-standing institutions in banang but unfortunately they are not spared from the effects of the pandemic so northern all suites hotel has said that they are closing for renovation and rebranding so hopefully we will see them reopening in the near future so for the hotel industry there are small periods of revival alongside domestic tourism but they are not sustainable due to the rising covet 19 cases and the cyclic shutdown of state borders and also we cannot discount the financial impact from the loss of international travelers that's going to be hugely that's that is hugely substantial and during the cycles of mco 2.0 3.0 and during mco 2.0 we have seen hotels recording single digit occupancy rates of between two to four percent so that's quite um severe indeed so to combat some of the negative effects most hotels have launched food and delivery take away services just to sustain their operations and of course these are the numbers for the start hotels we call them with ratings and we have not yet looked at the boutique hotels and the smaller hotels so the closure rates of these hotels might be very severe as well okay just to touch very quickly on the impact on domestic tourism so domestic tourism has fared better compared to international tourism this is of course very obvious but at the same time it's still um banan's thematic tourism is still very severely affected so intermittent lockdowns rising cases and of course ever-changing sops have caused massive uncertainty and um from a report published by the department of statistics us this year this year domestic tourism in 2020 for penang we saw a negative growth of 42.2 percent for total visitors and we have tourists declining by 29.6 and that excursion is declining by 46.8 percent so if we are going to use these numbers uh these percentages to make a very rough estimate of total loss of domestic tourist receipts it's a loss of 3.6 billion when compared to 2019

next so uh just to discuss a bit on the impact on medical tourism so as we know the medical tourism industry is one of the top contributors to bernanke's overall tourism sector because um just some numbers in 2018 the latest data that we have banan has accounted for 56.8 percent of overall tourists medical tourists and 60.7 percent of total medical tourism revenue so that's quite a substantial bit of the country's overall patience as well as revenue so from the chart we can see that the industry enjoyed rather strong growth rates after a bit of a negative bounce back in 2018 so in 2019 we saw very good growth rates of uh 19.2 percent in revenue and 10 in total patients but that's brought to an abrupt help in 2020 as we can see uh patients declined by 71.4 percent and revenue declined by 77 um this is this actually mirrors the production loss from the malaysian healthcare travel council and these losses are not surprising at all because uh penang's medical tourism industry does hinge primarily on international patients more most specifically indonesia where more than ninety percent of uh banangs health tourists actually held from indonesia so moving forward i think there's going to be a need to re-establish banan as a safe and trusted medical heart uh just to add that the malaysian healthcare travel council's projection for 2021 for this year uh is 50 of 2019's revenue so this projection was actually made late last year but looking at our current situation in september now international borders have not opened for the whole year um i would i would guess to say that a 50 revenue of 2019's revenue is going to be an overestimation as our situation have largely remained the same okay moving on um so just to uh take a look at the mice tourism sector so again mice is another very substantial contributor to the tourism sector and as with and each subsector they are also greatly hampered by travel restrictions as well as event restrictions so um mice tourism typically involves large-scale gatherings and of course this is prohibited during the lockdowns and then intermittent easing actually did allow for some events to take place but then they are not at full capacity given the need for social distancing so this affects revenue and profit so if we look at the chart that's presented so data is from the annual reports of the penang convention and exhibition bureau so we can see massive reductions in events and in estimated economic impact international events and economic impact especially is at an all-time low for for the company and then um we can see negative growth rates between 93 to 100 for international events in terms of estimated economic impact so domestic in domestic events as we we can see far much better but you still see negative growth rates of 88.9 percent so that's that's still quite dire as we say so um the industry has tried to reinvent itself with the con combination of uh virtual events and physical events so a hybrid events which uh but if it's going to be hybrid where half of them is going to be virtual and the other half is going to be opposite perhaps less than half is going to be physical we cannot discount um that the fact that this will not generate as much value as purely physical events as we have done in the past okay so very quickly just a little bit on impact on heritage tourism and uh ecotourism so i think with um in pandemic times uh we are used to see mass we are used to seeing mass tourism in full effect so crops of crops of tourists and crops in georgetown in heritage areas such as the clan jetties galaxy et cetera but i think these vulnerabilities have been exposed by the pandemic so um convergence of these huge groups at heritage sites i think uh will probably need to be reexamined going forward so are we looking at a shift away from crops and mass terrorisms into small groups so that's something to be discussed and then of course equal tourism and its uh local communities also suffered tremendous losses with no no tourists during the pandemic so but for equal tourism um as a model of sustainable tourism so the model of equal tourism is seen as one of the ways forward in rethinking post-pandemic terrorism so this is also one thing that we could be discussing in the panel later because of its emphasis on wide open spaces and on small groups of tourists for the purpose of nature preservation and sustainability is kind of one of the angles of resilient tourism going ahead so i think in conclusion it's safe to say that the road to complete recovery and the rebuilding of the tourism industry is highly dependent on the containment of the pandemic additionally i think we will need to be considering the successful rollout of vaccination programs and the perpetual engagement between all stakeholders will be necessary going forward in the rebuilding and resilience of the industry thank you thank you very much peijung it was a very clear overview of the current situation of tourism industry in pening what we understood from pina and patron sorry pedro's presentation is that um as a result of the pandemic lockdowns and massive uncertainties uh the tourism industry has seen a significant loss of income especially in the areas of retail trade hospitality industry moist tourism as well as medical tourism in addition ecotourism and its local communities also suffered huge losses so to discuss more about these issues and the way forward let's move on to the panelists discussion uh please allow me to introduce our first panelist for uh tonight's discussion we have miss catherine cho catherine is the vice chairperson of the association of tourism attractions in pinang she is also the owner of the tropical spice garden a sustainable eco-tourism project and her personal beloved then for the past 17 years the gardens for her is more than just business as usual or just another tourist tourism attraction rather it is an expression of an ideal lifestyle and culture of living as close to nature as possible and of understanding the symbiotic relationship between man and environment and between culture and nature catherine is a graduate in sociology and education from the university of york uk welcome katrin our next panelist is miss lee guplin gigling was the former managing director of penang global tourism a state tourism organization set up in 2009 she left five years after setting it up leaving a legacy of innovative projects events and campaigns including a very early mobile app for p9 tourism in 2010 she then took on uh consulting roles and organized the first p9 leadership forum for all heads of state agencies with thought leaders from different countries and across multiple disciplines in 2018 together with the web in travel team from singapore she co-founded and co-organized with indy a platform for independence and creatives to learn network collaboration cooperate collaboration and share best practices and she has also held consulting roles with hotels and the travel agency giblin is a graduate in education and physics major from university science malaysia welcome to both of you thank you let me start with catherine catherine as we all know and based on data presented by pedro tourist attractions or one of the areas that have been heavily hit by the pandemic mainly due to the lockdowns and significant drops in the number of visitors as a representative of the association of tourism attraction in p9 can you please share with us a little bit about current situation of tourist attractions in pinang and the main challenges faced by them during the pandemic hey good evening everybody and thanks um so it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that it's just been absolutely dire right i mean as a representative of the association of tourism attractions i'm privy to you know to talk to a lot of the major players of attractions in penang i sit on the committees on you know we have a good relationship and and you know i i saw i put that question out to them excuse the traffic i put that question out to them you know what i mean so could you describe the situation and here just some of the some of the little boxes that came back you know and you see that dire situation just repeated over and over again you see you know it's critical zero income um and you know i think one of the members put it so succinctly how much worse can it really get so you know um we have a lot of us have shared experiences so in my next slide i talk a little bit about you know the issues and challenges um the most obvious one being just having zero income you know i mean one night you have a business and the next night you have nose business you know if um if you can if you defined yourself as tourism and and through it all you have the the ongoing overheads from staffing utilities in my case rental um and then you know i was just kind of thinking through like you know you know what was some of these challenges and for me just a little little itty bitty things like salary negotiation this kind of constant like how much work will you do how much will we pay you how much can we afford how much can our savings stretch for and so this is constant uncomfortable negotiation because re recognizing that your staff need to survive they need to live there's a livelihood here as well you know um you know and then and then for in my experience it was that challenge of realizing and recognizing from very early on that this is not going to be just a size this is not just going to be like a one two month thing this is there was a much long long haul in view and and um and and so you're trying to transform your entire business through all the uncertainty uh you know there's time pressures putting being placed on you there is you know you've got reduced manpower working for you because there's many dropped by the wayside and yet you're trying to transform the whole business inside out you know so it was incredibly pressurizing in that sense and you know i also talk about the pressures of time you know suddenly we became um full-time teachers at home to children and there's all that whole very real factor as well um and you know as i was as i say to the team and all the time it's just you're trying to on you're trying to plan for an absolutely unplannable situation you know it's unprecedented what we're feeling uh what we're going through and even coming out of it now do we really know what's ahead do we really can we really plan you know it's uh extremely challenging yeah thanks a lot katrin for sharing this well yeah this pandemic has indeed very tangible impacts for the tourism sector which is critical for many people places and businesses it also shows gap in industry preparedness and response capacities um geoplank i've worked with you on a couple of tourism related projects and i've always known you as a somebody very positive but can you still be positive at a time like this when almost all figures are showing downward trends again you're not trying to make me out to be someone who is delusional right you've seen all the numbers by pedro you've seen catherine's slides on her members of uttar all suffering and all in dire straits so i'm i'm i'm not a magician not predicting uh when all this will go away and i think being still positive at a time like this does not mean not acknowledging how bad times are but i think the optimistic side of me saw lots of exciting things and i think that that saying that their opportunities amid adversity cannot cannot ring more true i think than at a time um like this sometimes it takes this kind of situation to make people get out of their comfort zone and again these are all terms which everyone is so familiar with but do we really know how to do something about it you know and so this is the test this is the test now let me just say something uh we're not there yet maybe i don't know we're not there yet as in we haven't opened up but look at singapore singapore is an island i think they've never even used that term before domestic tourism i think more than anyone else this is a new term for them and yet they have managed to make it work to some extent they're getting excited there with the experiences normal experiences that they have created dining in in aircrafts dining in cable cars all creative experiences so the platform that's selling experiences for example clook which we in with indy tried to introduce to our local players back in 2018 at first with indie conference they sell experiences on their platform and for the countries that have opened up slightly in terms of local tourism in china hong kong taiwan and in singapore klook has reported for the first time uh a prophet and they saw more experiences than they ever did pre-covet times so what does that say you know so there are lots of opportunities out there hey even you if you take even the little provision shop which i at one time thought was was at risk of dying and was going around asking people hey what can we do to help this little provision shop out and that's guangdong a shop of over 100 years even they are saying they're doing better than ever okay that's not tourism but i'm just saying it's still adversity for them right thinking they're selling only to the locals they're selling like local food stuff waxed meat and stuff like that and i was like what because they learn to then sell online the proprietor is now over 90 years old he you can say of course he got help he's not the one doing it doesn't matter but it for him to say that his business now is better than ever that's that's amazing so there are lessons to learn that we can all learn from this whether we choose to or not now sadly i i i think it won't be unfair of me to say this that that the players in penang has been slow in rising up to the demands of of digitalization i just wish they had been faster as i said i i organized the first boot camp when i was still in pgt in 2014 paying for with indeed to come and organize this boot camp inviting people to come and listen to some of the novel ideas already at that time including like uh revenue management for the hotels you know uh social media how to use social media marketing and and i think if you ask me then i would say i think this reset is good because all those things i tried to say nobody wanted to listen so now there's there's no choice you have to start and i really hope that people will start soon never mind if we don't have the expertise by hook or by crook we have to learn from him i don't know and i hope that people are more organized uh in trying to learn um i think at a time like this i imagine and i hope i'm right i imagine that collaboration right now is more important than competition yes and all in the same board would come together collaborate help each other out because i i don't think anyone sticks out like in this case in penang as in monopolizing anything kind of like everyone is in the same boat together so i think policy makers have lots of opportunities in intervening coming up with interventions of how to help look look at what they they need look at what they all need right i'm glad to see that that now catherine has good uh connection data at tropical spice garden as you know we only recently discovered when i naively asked catherine why were there no virtual tours what did people not want to make money internet when this would get started right i i was i was so privileged and i i got invited to a little birthday party it was it was it was so fun you know and that was um early may so just one and a half uh months into the panda maybe we were all locked down until we were silly already and a friend got this creative idea invited us to her birthday party and then they played videos they had rehearsed a song and dance you know bollywood style dancing together to music all by a zoom everybody was learning to use zoom for the first time you know no matter where you are it was the first time for somebody in sweden first time for somebody in australia first time for somebody in singapore and i thought wow exciting things uh are just in the horizon right that you can do this so so the host actually even had her birthday cake distributed to a few of us in penang she had more participants more more attendees around the world but but of course only to the ones in penang we all received a slice of cake just before the party and they played a video of how the cake was made by china house and they must say wow so it was a great evening you know everybody participated in that and then that month itself we bought a ticket it was quite clever this young man um and i forgive him for all the technical glitches you know what it was it was a bicycle tour that we signed up for and all of us cycling enthusiasts one person paid for it bought it for i don't know something like 11 us euros 11 euros and then you get to invite 10 friends and you get the link everyone logs in right so i even got my mother to watch and she was she couldn't understand what was going on what what what this guy is there in amsterdam and a few things i remember very clearly the young man said you know at normal times i won't be able to do this cycle like this in the middle of amsterdam holding a mobile phone so you see for the first time but i remember this i remember his passion talking about his city right it wasn't about the cycling and that that was that was the takeaway so you you forgive him i don't remember anymore about the shaky camera you know but that somebody who who who lives in amsterdam who's a resident there could think of doing such a thing it wasn't very expensive for just 11 euros and we signed up just to see what it's like and i remember at that time waiting for somebody to do something like that in penang i thought we had lots of people you know with all the experiences so then i started doing uh street art guess where not in georgetown in brazil people were doing virtual tours but i do understand now go ahead cat you might want to say something about that what your frustration about that with the infrastructure yeah i mean absolutely i mean yeah i mean you're like a voice calling in the wilderness uh girling when i hear you speak and i'm like yeah i was there at the 2018 uh wit indy and it was like groundbreaking and i and i wish i had taken heed you know i i myself am to blame that we didn't we didn't take heed when when when you had the time opportunity you know you're so caught up with everything else running this business so crazy you know um but yeah i mean like as you said you know here i am with with unifi just newly installed and i've been i've suffered with like dinosaur internet for 18 years and suddenly as of this month september 21 i finally have internet i'm like wow it has suddenly opened up new possibilities that has never been there before right so now i can finally address the virtual tours and all of that so that's the whole stepping into that part of it next and and the upskilling right so now that we have this it's like oh suddenly it's like my goodness half the team won't even know what to do we will have to collaborate with experts we will have to reach out to tech companies and techno house and all that so it's like it's it's pa playing a very accelerated catch up so yeah so take heed when you hear something and you know that's the lesson take heat and run with it don't don't sit on your your laurels i can already experience your place just listening to your talk negan can you hear it can you hear all the insects going on the crickets and the cicadas in the back yeah unfortunately all the traffic as well but i can't drown that out but yeah the sound of the nature is amazing uh thanks uh gilling and thanks catherine for for sharing your thoughts uh actually then an interesting point that gilling has just brought up is the experience um or or is actually the existence of new opportunities well times of crisis of course bring tough challenges but they also present new opportunities i totally agree with that um many successful innovative businesses have emerged from periods of crisis for instance uber airbnb whatsapp groupon were all funded during or just after the global financial crisis and the sars outbreak in other words crises are often times of major restructuring which may eventually result in a stronger and more resilient economy uh catherine your business at the spice garden um like other um tourist attractions in p9 were also adversely affected by the pandemic what was your creative solution to adopt and survive during the pandemic yeah um you know there were a few shared lessons that i think a lot of us came through i mean i'm talking from speaking to my to my peers in the industry and you know without a doubt almost all of them said you know it's about having a healthier cash flow as you move forward you know moving away from this single source of income you know not putting your eggs all in one basket and realizing how important it is to diversify what you do so those are the i think the shared experiences that we that we all um you know walk through um some of the other ones that came up were just being agile and ready to transform that you know this whole what is what it has taught us that you really cannot be so set in your ways you've got to be able to be adapt and move um because things really do move so fast right and and of course the underpinning all of that is never ignore your local market that and i think uh that kind of moves me into my my little story and my journey through this um so my little notes from tsg is like as i kind of sat on this a little bit more and how do i you know how do i put this forward tonight um i think one of the biggest lessons for me was realizing um this has taught me that i can actually live on a lot less the the business can survive on a lot less everyone you know in our in our personal capacities can actually survive in a lot less and so you start to think about the excesses that we lived through and um and realizing we really don't need so much you know we really don't need as much as we think we do we don't need all those excesses and i re and i realized that it was the fact that we are we are a small business we always have been we've i've always had a small team and i've always i've always felt in some way the poorer cousin to some of the bigger players out there because we are we are small but i've but in this time i've been actually very thankful that we're small and um and so could i dare say that small is the new big you know because being small gave us the ability to be more agile more more conservative and more lean when we had to be you know i i we could make faster decisions that the team could adapt faster and of course we had less um less overheads and everything to to to cope with the situation um some of the some of the big things for me as well were i really used this time it was a really very personal time for me where i especially during the first mco where it was just three four months of solitude and it was uh going very deep into it was almost like a vision quest you know and realizing that it's about really kind of refocusing our efforts into the value of where our business are what's what our story really is and allowing everything to just be burnt away and and realizing that so much of what i did you know i i just felt like you are filled with some some regret like i like i wish i had zoomed in earlier on the things that really mattered to my heart and in this and um and i think the last thing was about um that first and foremost you know whatever we do must have a relevance um by the local community first i think that was one of another big takeaway for me and so out of that whole three months of solitude and silence um what what we i then birthed was this statement of hati danbumi and that for me at that time it was a recovery it was my recovery campaign statement it was saying you know the spice garden is going to emerge from this not you know we're not getting back to business as usual we're not getting back to where we were but it's really it's a it's a new beginning where we are returning to what the core value of our of this garden is it's the core value of who we are it's returning to that place of soil earth and what grows out from that and i know it sounds in some way quite cheesy but it really it really was that you know simplifying business it you know simplifying and cutting back of the excesses um so so out so what grew out of hatidan bumi translated you know heart and soil was this idea that if you know um that we need to we make we need to make a connect with community that first first and foremost you know what's gonna ride through this and and uh and i feel like this whole one and a half years for us was journeying quite ironically out from tourism so so i i was trying to kind of pictorially um uh show this and in my next slide um you know in the very core center you know we were always seen as a tourist attraction you know our tourist attraction was based on telling a story of penang and its spice trade its spice history agricultural history you know spice related and then i feel like it's grown along the years you know then you know we we kind of widened that a little bit we are a botanical gardens you know we are repository of plants and plant knowledge and so that was something we carried as well um and in fact uh just recently we've uh with we've um started to engage with conversations uh to be a seed seed reserve um there's a seed reserve or seed bank initiative that's happening nationwide and we want to be a part of that you know where we share knowledge and we share you know hidden forgotten grandmother stories of our plants our herbs and all that and then of course and then during this pandemic again it grew like i want to be a community space it's not just i don't just want to be an attraction where people come and go but it's about building a community that stay with us grow with us and feel there's a belonging to this place and i feel that became so important during this time and then a future vision that i'm currently now wrestling with planning for is some sort of forest school vision with where we start affecting the next generation and how what a forest education would could possibly look like on the grounds so so this so it's this real journey so out of that grew spice fam spice fan was our way of of um overcoming you know you know as i had mentioned earlier you know one night you have a tourism business the next day you don't um but i believe and i and i there was something very innate in me that believed that somehow this space was still relevant business may not be relevant but the actual physical space of being a green healing a sanctuary was relevant and it and it was about bringing the community here who are my new community you know it may not be my international community but it's certainly my our neighbors right around me from penang and so outgrew spice spam which is basically a it's it's a membership but i don't like we don't like that word membership and um and you know it was about making it affordable it's a garden for all to you know um and that's really my heart of it and and so and so it was cheap it's it's 25 ringgit a month and and and and so that and that and and that's how it all started really and and so from from last november it's not we we kick-started this actually in november but it's it was off to a very slow start because we never we never had the opportunity to go big with it or anything because we kept going to lockdown and everything so you know just planning was just a nightmare um so so the next few the next few slides just show a little bit about the different communities that we engage with so we started a community garden where we had allotments growing and you know folks from the community came and they take they took up a uh an allotment for themselves where they can where they were free to grow anything you know so that was something that grew out of that and um the next slide uh you know shows that we started becoming more uh engaging with our children and what we did with kids and and that was me i did i did a natural guys workshop and it was just so i was like oh i'd much rather be doing this than sitting at some board meeting you know discussing tourism when this is where my heart was you know is to is to be with the children be in the ground and get my hands dirty you know so so yeah so this is all the good things that have come out of it and then just just moving along um [Music] moving along with the slides oh yeah we had uh we opened up our space we started engaging arts and culture so performances you know we had ida redza come with her dancers and we had this moving performance with the gardens and you know it was moving it was an incredible performance and so we can just keep going with the slides um yeah we had open mic sessions um uh you know like sundown evenings we've done um going oh we're now introducing outdoor camping um so we've identified places in the gardens and there's a and we're yeah so there's been a real demand for for camping so that's we're really excited about that actually um you can keep going uh yeah wellness has been again a growth of what we did so now with our spice fan packages we we're offering um yoga classes every tuesday morning and again you know it's about seeing seeing the outdoors at the new studio you know everyone wants to get out right so um so this is just the beginning of more to come we've had singing bowl workshops uh dance workshops they're still ongoing keep going the cycling community is also a big one that we engage on on saturday mornings we throw open uh an open-air um coffee shop it's just we just sell good coffee and uh and the cyclists just swing by oh this is a repeat you can keep going and uh just you know we've always run cooking classes but uh you know during the pandemic we were able to take this virtual so yes virtual tours is the obvious next that we have to overcome so we're getting the cooking classes first yeah so yeah i hope that so yeah i feel um it has been a really exciting time and i and i'm i know that this pandemic has caused so much destruction around the world and you know we have not been spared but i hope that i can paint picture of some hope as well that you know that there is opportunity in this and um and it's been it's been such an exciting journey for us and it feels i feel so fulfilled in what i do now um in in some sense compared to the last 18 years it sounds crazy but you know suddenly it feels like this is really where i want to be so it's exciting yeah it's all in there thanks a lot catherine quite interesting so due to the pandemic you restructured your business and now uh you more focus on community-based tourism and community garden which was very interesting in in a very innovative way uh it shows how important our creative creativity and innovative ideas to attract tourists during a crisis and of course it is certain that the future of tourism will strongly rely on digital and technological discoveries these innovations are in fact going to shape the new to this experience perhaps uh googling you have done many innovative projects events and campaigns before when you were with pgt and when you were running a bit indie can you share with us some of your experiences in the past and as well as during the pandemic yeah sure this was this was one of my earliest activities when a celebrity chef from the uk wanted to come to penang film this is back in 2010 my first year on the job and see coincidentally since i knew i was going to be talking to catherine i pulled this photograph out luckily i could find it so this is atul kochar from london and we did the first cooking uh demonstration of for him at the tropical spice garden before tree monkey was built this was the the the platform um so and not everything has to be uh digital related technology related but people tend to think that creative uh creativity creative economy means that you know it's it's it's not like the creative economy now more than half of it is actually in non-arts related so it means an accountant can adopt a creative method to be more productive and more efficient right uh so it's it's not about being in the arts alone and how how how do you want how do you do that a lot of times in when you're partnering something so when i was looking into a guidebook when i was looking at it first it was a lux guide i thought but that cost too much money so i was determined to have time out for penang i thought that was some kind of measure of internationality um instead of creating penang global tourism's own guidebook right i mean like who would know you but time out it's already unknown brand so if it's like if it's worth timeouts money in it it will be worth a place to see to visit that enough to do because that's what timeout does right it lists our activities what to see what to do so in order to get that to happen it was new it was all novel so what we did was it was still business right business we in a way panicked over tourism pre-bought 200 copies of time out from them and that got the first uh what would you call the edition the first addition of timeout for p9 the idea of the mobile app came when i was attending um a trade show in berlin for the very first time and i'm a bit of a tech tech geek but that was when i was way back when i was working in the construction industry i worked with american companies french companies and telephone calls would be too expensive so i was already using skype at that time so always using technology right for for business so when i saw that in berlin at the show that they had itb they had a pavilion just for technology i couldn't resist that was the only pavilion that i visited and i spent two hours there and i saw for myself the very first time what they're booking hotels and all on their mobile phone already so that was in march when we visited itb this is still one of the little things i was very proud of because i happened to then be introduced to a mobile app developer who was from penang and this this again this penang champion thing right you you always want to believe that the penang can do it right we're supposed to be a city of first we were city of first for so many things we had the first school but the first bank in southeast asia all the first and we managed to launch that mobile app by october the very same year uh and i believe at that time too that we had to learn how to do this not that it had to be perfect the first time but how especially in technology you just have to immerse yourself into it so i get highly excited highly excitable when it's uh technology projects and therefore when i was again uh talking to someone and i had this opportunity to run the other to run another event using technology i didn't want to miss out on it so that's the video mapping uh projection um after it was done at suffolk house we repeated this at the town hall for malaysia dave i'm not mistaken and we had a live borea in front of it so it was i guess you call it hybrid today you can say that there was a hybrid event with the borea of live music and video mapping projection on the town hall facade so this was i i think back in 2012 if i'm not mistaken but you know negin um i think it was just three years ago i took my mother to sydney to see vivid sydney oh my god the level of video mapping projection that they have done there we stopped after this project um so where are you gonna get people who will be good at it if they're never given the opportunity to try and i guess at the time with my position in pgt i had that budget i suppose when the project when the event was right to to be able to give the opportu opportunity to young technology innovators to try this out i believe that was still one of the more exciting things that that i did thank you thank you so much uh for your insightful thoughts it's actually also important to anticipate like what you were saying also to anticipate people's needs right so what what consumer required during the pandemic for for our case so we we all know that consumers confidence has been hit hard by the crisis and the ongoing uncertainty in fact consumers behavior has changed a lot during the pandemic for instance safety and hygiene have become key factors to select destinations hotels and you know tourist activities or uh for example new destinations those that were not popular they became popular um so my next question is directed to katrin in your opinion how can we give a kind of consumer's confidence that shows businesses are coveted secure and safe and how changes in consumers behavior can affect on on tourism industry yeah covet secure and safe i mean that's almost i feel at this point a bit little bit impossible perhaps just to be able to give that level of guarantee because it's really i mean we've moved you know everyone's talking about that new world about being it being it being endemic right now right so it's a heart and it is a hard one i mean you know all of us know what the logical answers are you know it's that it's that distance the more the more open spaces are going to be more appealing i believe um you know ventilation is a big thing right you know and so so obviously i think someone's going to feel safer in an outdoor space someone's going to feel safer in a room with much less people in and it's well ventilated um someone's gonna feel safer i suppose if you're indoor and you know everyone's masked and all that and you know so those are those are really the the answers and i and i guess to some extent maybe i haven't struggled so much with these um with these issues because i'm an outdoor you know a space and i and i realize i do have a clear advantage and i'm so thankful i'm so so thankful that um you know uh this is where we are and this is the space that you know it was my it was my refuge during during the lockdown you know it was for me and my family just personally being able to come here and just breathe and and feel alive and feel safe you know so i think um certainly um those would be all the the the the typical answers that that you know that would be logical to move forward but you know um but now really is the time to to re to be looking at resetting to to more to more sustainable tourism because when you when you start talking about reduction in numbers it means that the where where you could fit in a thousand people you can fit in a lot less now and so the business owners have to be comfortable with that this is the new this is gonna be the new way you know and so um and i'm i'm actually quite looking forward to it i mean i've realized now you know when we you know we used to talk about the arab season you know it's like gaming season it's terrible we should stop using that way in the season season but anyway so and and we used to have like like hundreds literally thrown through the doors and and you know at that time it was seen as desirable and it was seen as you know a good thing but now you know as we are slowly beginning to reopen and we're allowing a few guests in we've been allowing some people to camp um as pilot tests for ourselves and realizing that their experience has been heightened because they it there's a feeling that they've got this magical garden all to themselves and i think that's such that's so much value in that and realizing that that is magic right like like there's all these swarms of people so i'm quite looking forward to less people and less just less frenzy you know and that sort of thing um and you know one of the big things i mean i i i always like to say is that uh you know this whole covalent cetera i mean for me it's a it is it started as a medical problem and so for me a medical problem also needs to be addressed medically and and i and i just i just wish that there would be more open transparent discussion on early treatment protocols um i mean so much of the fear is that you know hospitals are being jammed up you know and and you know there's all that issue right but i you know i believe that there needs to be a little bit more talk about um empowering the people to treat and treatments that are out there and i cite india as a case study to perhaps you know one can go and look at how they overcame um their their surge their pandemic um uh yeah and i just want to say you know for the record that uh i i do personally make a personal stand against vaccine passports and mandatory vaccinations um i feel that it's a stripping away of freedoms and i feel it's um it's it's a it's a level of control that i don't want to be rebuilding i don't want the the future of travel to be rebuilding to this future and um and i i know i recognize that i may not be speaking on behalf of uh of the majority or even of my association but i just feel like i i needed to say that thank you so much katrine um and that's that's very clear uh giving any thought on on consumers confidence uh if you think how changes in consumers behavior can affect on tourism industry well definitely um i i heard something interesting just a few days ago that when tourism reopened in china for example everything went up uh uh to more than pre-covert days for the same labor day holiday uh by 20 by 50 but there was one astounding figure and that was 300 in guess what rental cars and then when you think about it oh that's a no-brainer right that means people will not uh going to share uh writing share rides with anyone right so car rental went up so there are all of these observations that we can learn that we can i guess first observe look at the challenges and the point i wanted to make is i don't know how much of this of all these issues we are discussing a requirement of travel insurance for example to cover kovit is that mandatory uh who will start this kind of conversation um i see we already have a question uh can i bring that up now sorry yes yes of course we can uh we have a question from corrine one to a panelist so because she said to panelists i i take the liberty and but it's a very interesting question she said langkawi is open to domestic tourists gandhi and island joined langkawi to welcome domestic tourists on october 1st penang is not on the list how do you feel about this korean are you trying to incite anger what um and well when you say this it's it's not about feeling okay maybe what right what do i think about this i well i still have all those questions so if pine hasn't started asking those questions yet so they might might as well start asking now so that they are more ready i don't know how long how how ready or the oman islands are i i don't um but i'm saying i'm i'm saying that there's so many things to think about right protocols um how how do you do this it's it's not about what you want it's whether you are ready and what does that mean ready somebody's got us to to to uh spell that out right even when someone said i think in the early days uh that you have to sanitize your car and i was wondering what does that mean it's not something we've done before in the past what does that mean requiring bus operators to sanitize uh the buses for example what go in there and then spray a can with a can of dettol you know it has to be very specific right um like this if we welcome and and i heard that our hospitals are already overwhelmed now um so if if cases search where do they go if a visitor comes and needs medical requirement uh whom do they call covet treatment is is not cheap so i tried asking this about insurance uh and i think that that that discussion has got to start right thailand has started it in the uh opening up to to tourists that and they've stated that travel insurance against covet 19 is mandatory and you buy it when if you don't have it in your country you buy in thailand so somebody's got to be working with with insurance companies no i'm not advocating for the insurance company i'm just saying this is a genuine uh question right are we are we are we ready uh when we say open we open i don't know maybe catherine is more privy to all these discussions i don't know but but that's the question isn't it i mean but on the other hand can we ever be ready i mean will we ever be ready i mean if we have to wait for the perfect scenario i don't think we'll ever be ready because no one really knows what we're doing i don't think everybody every every nation every city is struggling with the same questions the same issue so it's so i guess at that point you just have to start you just have to start and be prepared to fail and and be prepared to quickly pick up quickly learn and move on from that because honestly if you don't start we are dying you know it's it's you just gotta you just have to go you cannot keep us locked down like this indefinitely yeah so i mean that's really my fear you just have to but that was that's what it means also about the about the authorities who say this island is ready that island is ready what are they basing it on i don't know and when they announce it there's hardly any information that goes with it you know in terms of yeah a specification what i mean it just feels it's just based more on a political choice rather than uh you know that they are more ready than the penang nights you know really yeah unfortunately yeah and probably having more cases also may not mean a place is less ready right if the industry players are more prepared behind the scenes in in training uh and re-skilling um should should that not come in uh into account should it just be uh on just numbers right so there are so many things um to look into uh perhaps a place that has more open space for example right so there are all these these these things that like i said that that um policy interventions have the opportunity hey we're talking look at talking about open space i'm i'm just wondering so many questions to think about um uh will we be for example allowing more places to dine al fresco i mean at the time for for a while our city council says no tables and chairs on five foot ways for example right but are we ready to rethink that and allow them to have tables and chairs on five foot ways now now that alfresco dining is deemed safer and that dining capacity has been reduced to half for example and all these places are so small you reduce the capacity to half how many people can they sit inside so is this a time now for them to rethink it so this would be a way of helping them right so it's not just with with help it's not just about giving handouts but maybe giving more opportunities and that's just one little example that that i that has come to my head every every time i see these people struggling with their businesses um and and look at when they allow businesses to reopen that you can dine in how many restaurants are really open now why are they not open so being given the permission to open uh may not may not mean you want to to open so make perhaps uh representing attack i mean the whole collective group should think about that probably uh and make that decision on behalf of the policy makers i think you can tell better whether you're ready not they yeah thank you so much uh gambling uh for your very insightful comment and answering the question katrina as well thanks just to audience if you have any questions please submit it in the comment section we can discuss about it during the discussion so i think it's a good idea to combine the panel discussion with q a if there is any question we can address it during this session uh giving like just now you were talking about readiness um etc so it it leads me to the next question uh currently most of uh strategies are focusing on how safely uh reopening and promoting domestic tourism but at some point we need to also reopen the country to international visitors right so in part to domestic collaboration we also need regional and international corporations whether that is related to airline regulations hotels simplifying and eliminating visa requirements etc it also depends a lot on like what you mentioned uh on the vaccination so it depends on vaccination rate which is currently not so equal especially in the region um giving even the current situation of kobe when do you think the country the country will be ready to open up to international visitors or establish regional suboriginal travel bubble can the phuket sandbox model be applied in malaysia what do you think well in the first place uh nagin phuket sandbox model excludes malaysia yeah we're not in on the list of those that can travel to phuket under that model so that's that's where even my most optimistic side cannot answer of course at some point it will go back again i will keep saying that it's up to us to ready ourselves and even if there are no policies made nothing changed it's up to us what can we what can we do i almost have this vision now you know and again that when everything opens up and we go back uh to restaurants to dining that that will have superb five-star service everywhere because everyone hasn't seen a customer in so long but would that be reality i i don't know so i really cannot answer the question that there are too many things right now going on um the the airlines oh my god uh with with we've lost direct flight to hong kong um i think we're still flying to taiwan uh on star lux uh china but uh is china southern still in operation uh all our direct flights to bangkok i think just before the pandemic the tourism well tourism penang was so um positive about everything and trying to increase direct flights for example they've been asking for direct flights to australia places like australia korea for the longest time so maybe with this reset everything resets right so i don't know what that means perhaps lose some win some i don't know before for me i think even if you don't look that far let's try to be ready for local first um i was looking forward to when you were locked down right when you completely locked down i suddenly treasured my freedom of going over to the mainland when we couldn't go anymore and when that was allowed i made a few trips over there i went to you know a recreational area went to kampung argon went over the fun diversity for the first time it was all only because of kobe 19 went over there for seafood um and and then there has been all this talk about promoting more tourism for the mainland and yet at a time like this where are the local experiences on the mainland right so that's part of that domestic tourism we are talking about so first you're locked down within your district so when in the district opens we can do something why wait why wait so then from interdistrict it becomes interstate so if you you can't handle inter-district what makes what makes penang people like what catherine said it's about local community so everything's got to be good enough for us um it's not just about being ready for tourists right everything that we do if we do it well people will automatically won't come you know right now we're going to have two unesco recognitions we have we have the heritage one and now we have the unesco biosphere reserve um so as the optimist here nagin i am not worried about international business wanting to return if if we get our act right so if we do it right and you know social media sometimes you don't even have to do the marketing it will be everywhere like that that that if the locals have a what makes it what's what makes the difference if it's a locals posting on social media that they had a great time in ayur hitam or in kampung gong for example won't that be some kind of testimonial already right so we should start with that more people encourage more people to go and then highlight the hopefully the improvement in all the services or infrastructure transport for example how do you get there if we could do that first for inter district and then i think we will be more than ready for interstate or

2021-10-15 09:28

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