Tourism and Culture Minister Mohamed Nazri Aziz said the additional budget was needed for advertising and promotional activities.

“We hope that the government will give us the additional budget in order to do promotions, because Malaysia is among Asean’s touristic countries. Compared to Thailand and Vietnam, they have bigger promotion budgets, especially for tourists from China and India.

“We are grateful that the government recognises the pressing need for better visa services to attract more Chinese and Indian tourists, but the awareness and the ability to advertise our products is also a must.

“So we need more money to achieve that,” he told reporters after launching the 6th Global Summit on Urban Tourism here yesterday.

Under Budget 2018, the ministry was given an allocation of RM500 million to be used for development and promotional activities such as improving tourist facilities, home-stay and eco-tourism programmes.

Nazri said the RM500 million allocation was “tight” due to debts from the past two years on advance bookings for tourism promotional activities.

“Our ministry’s budget is different from others.

“We need to pay deposits in advance booking for space to advertise our products. When the government reduced the budget from RM200 million for promotional activities over the past years, we were left with no more than RM110 million.

“The RM500 million under the budget was actually to pay our debts for the advance bookings from year 2015-2017, so we need another RM300 million to advertise and promote our tourism products,” he said.