In order to appeal to the local crowd, the Malaysia Tourism Council (MTC) leads every tourism association to develop new products and to promote off-road destinations in Malaysia.

Recently, the local community in Perak's UNESCO-certified Lenggong Valley was trained to become product operators and to tailor its services to the domestic market while international borders remain closed.

Uzaidi Udanis, president of MTC, shared, "The tourism is important to the local community. Since 2012, the Lenggong Valley has been given UNESCO status but it wasn't promoted by many Malaysians.'

Since the government allowed domestic tours to resume earlier this month with only travel between states that control the recovery movement (RMCO) and governmental tourism agencies , Uzaidi said that the first project of the MTC was to hold a technical visit to Lenggong Valley by travel agents early in the coming month.

"The primary objective of the one-night two-day visit is to connect travel agents and community leaders to network and explore business opportunities".

Uzaidi said at the time of pre-Covid, many small operators in Malaysia did not build their own tours but relied instead on the selling of the tours for the foreign inbound market developed by large wholesalers in Malaysia.

“We are encouraging these smaller players to develop their own tourism products for the domestic market, (which can be marketed to) international inbound tourists when the border reopens.”

In addition, in June, MTC plans to organise technical visits to Pulau Tuba agents in Langkawi and on the islands off Johor, in accordance with a national tourism masterplan, as well as promoting ecotourism and community-based tourism in these areas.

Uzaidi said: "Agent can no longer survive in these tough times by selling dry rooms only because they are going to be directly competing with hotels."