Expert Reports

Piggies, the smell of straw, and cockcrowing at dawn ... A designer bathroom, homemade ham and jam for breakfast, 150 TV channels. All this is ‘rolled into one’, on a neat fattoria, 30 kilometers away from Bologna, or near Parma - today this can be in any old place in Italy. This country was the pioneer of agritourism.

The latest figures from Tourism Malaysia's data portal show that tourist arrivals fell from 26.76 million in 2016 to 25.95 million in 2017, and then down again to 25.83 million in 2018. The dip in 2018 compared to 2017 is mainly attributed to a 14.6% reduction in arrivals from Singapore. Only 10.62 million Singaporeans travelled to Malaysia last year, compared with 12.44 million in 2017.

The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) said in its annual review released last March that South Africa is the largest tourism economy in Africa.