Malaysia has been the major beneficiary of China’s ongoing political spat with South Korea over the deployment of a controversial anti-missile defence system.
According to a note from Maybank IB Research, the number of Chinese visitors to Malaysia is up 72% since Beijing started forcing travel companies to stop selling tours to South Korea.
The firm cited data from Spain based research firm ForwardKeys.
""We had postulated that CNTA [China National Tourism Administration] will encourage more Chinese tours to Malaysia. True enough, ForwardKeys reported that China to Malaysia airline bookings from 16 March, 2017 to 31 August, 2017 surged 72% year-on-year," Maybank analysts Wong Chew Hann and Samuel Yin Shao Yang wrote.
It calls Malaysia the ‘prime beneficiary’ of the political tensions as far as tourism revenue is concerned.
"If we assume that Chinese tourist arrivals for the whole of 2017 grow by a narrower 50% year-on-year, this will result in 3.2 million Chinese tourist arrivals for 2017. We estimate that the additional 1.1 million Chinese tourist arrivals will grow total [Malaysian] tourist arrivals by 4% year-on-year."
While the state has not admitted orchestrating a tourism boycott, Chinese citizens themselves have stopped buying Korean goods and last month more than 3,000 cruise passengers refused en masse to disembark during a port call at South Korea’s Jeju Island holiday hotspot.
