Was Malaysia The Most Visited Asean Country Last Year

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I REFER to the report “Malaysia is the most-visited ASEAN nation in 2024 with 38 million foreign arrivals”, and Tourism, Arts & Culture Minister Datuk Seri Tiong King Sing explaining that last year alone, Malaysia welcomed 38 million tourists – far exceeding the target of 27.3 million visitors.
He said in a statement “We have already reached 38 million tourists last year, so it’s time to review the target for TMM 2026. If we stick to 36 million, it would be lower than our current achievement”.
He added that the ministry wants to set a more realistic target that can bring greater economic benefits to the country through the tourism sector. Alongside increasing visitor numbers, MOTAC aims to boost tourism revenue, targeting at least RM150 bil.
The report went on to say that Malaysia’s remarkable performance in 2024 places it ahead of regional tourism powerhouse Thailand, which recorded 35.54 million foreign tourists, despite Bangkok retaining its title as the world’s most-visited city and Kuala Lumpur ranking 10th.
The report then compared ASEAN international tourist arrivals for 2024 with Malaysia (38m) and Thailand (35.54m), Vietnam (17.5m), Singapore (>15.3m), Indonesia (>12.66m), Cambodia (6.7m), the Philippines (5.43m), Laos (>5m) and Myanmar (>0.9m).
Figures for Singapore, Indonesia, Laos and Myanmar are only for the first 11 months of 2024. Brunei’s statistics have not been disclosed. Providing statistics and quoting from the highest source, the report appears authoritative.
But there is a fundamental flaw. For many years, I have written several published articles explaining the need to understand basic tourism terms such as tourists, visitors and excursionists, but the media and tourism personnel continued to interchange them freely.
(Image: Bernama)And now, our country may be the laughing stock in Southeast Asian tourism, even though Malaysia has assumed the ASEAN Chair in 2025. In our eagerness to surpass Thailand’s tourism, which is unlikely, we were too hasty to declare success for our efforts.
Perhaps, I am partly to blame for probably being the first to coin and use the term ‘visitor arrivals’. Over the past decades, ‘tourist arrivals’ was used internationally. As Tourism Malaysia had also published ‘excursionist arrivals’, I combined the figures to produce ‘visitor arrivals’.
In 2019, there were 26.1m tourist arrivals and 8.9m excursionist arrivals, making a total of 35m visitor arrivals. A year ago, I wrote that Malaysia recorded almost 29m visitor arrivals for 2023, and they comprised 20,141,846 foreign tourists and 8,822,462 foreign excursionists.
Three days later, a Vietnamese newspaper published “Malaysia beats Thailand to become most visited in Southeast Asia” based on the heading of my article. In 2023, Thailand recorded 28.15 million tourist arrivals.
Malaysia is likely to receive around 24.5m tourist arrivals last year compared to Thailand’s 34.54m. Our targets for tourist arrivals were 27.4m in 2024, 31.4m in 2025 and 35.6m in 2026.
We fell short of last year’s tourist arrivals target and may have to revise down this year’s target. Instead, the minister is planning to up the ante based on false narrative or poor understanding of visitor arrival figures. 
YS Chan is master trainer for Mesra Malaysia and Travel and Tours Enhancement Course and an Asean Tourism Master Trainer. He is also a tourism and transport business consultant.
The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of  MMKtT.
- Focus Malaysia.

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