Dhaka : Malaysia welcomed over 11.8 million tourists from January to June 2024. Of them, over 63,000 travellers were from Bangladesh. With this, Bangladesh ranks as the 15th top travel source market for Malaysia currently.

The figures were recently revealed in a report by the national tourism organisation Tourism Malaysia.

However, the current tourist arrival number from Bangladesh is down 22.9 per cent, compared to the same period a year ago, as over 81,000 Bangladeshi tourists arrived in Malaysia from January to June 2023.

The current figure is also below pre-pandemic levels, by 11.5 per cent, as between January to June 2019, over 71,000 Bangladeshi travellers visited Malaysia.

Nevertheless, Malaysia is enjoying double digit growth in tourist arrival numbers compared to last year.

The current tourist arrival number is up 28.9 per cent, compared to the January-June 2023 figure of 9.16 million.

Year-on-year tourist arrival numbers from Bangladesh between 2012-2024 _Photo : Tourism Malaysia

Furthermore, the country is quite close to reaching pre-pandemic levels of tourism-only 11.68 per cent behind January-June 2019's tourist arrival figure of 13.36 million.

Even tourist receipts are up of the popular travel destination in Southeast Asia.

In 2024, between January and June, tourist receipts amounted to RM 45,422 million, marking a 50.8 per cent increase from RM 30,120 million of the same period in 2023.

On a positive note, in tourist receipts, Malaysia has surpassed even pre-pandemic levels this year, by 9 per cent. It may be mentioned here, between January to June 2019, the country witnessed RM 41,687 million tourist receipts.

Between January and June 2024, the top five travel source markets for Malaysia were Singapore with 4.2 million, Indonesia with 1.7 million, China with 1.4 million, Thailand with 813,000 and Brunei with 565,000 travellers. Bangladesh's neighbouring country India stood sixth with 537,000. The average flight duration between Dhaka and Kuala Lumpur is almost four hours.