Sustainable Tourism in Malaysia

The success of tourism has been conventionally measured by tourist arrivals and revenues, but today this is not enough to maintain competitiveness. The current challenges of tourism development in developing countries are the tug-of-war between tourism development plans for economic purposes and sustainable tourism plans. In most of the cases there are reciprocal relationships between “tourism development” and “sustainability”. The context is significantly different from country to country when the analysis is focused on economic development goals of tourism. The economic goal of the country, private partnership, and local community involvement together with customer’s expectations make tourism a complicated area for sustainable practices. This paper elucidates the performance of “doing tourism” in a sustainable manner complying with the National Sustainable Tourism Policy of Malaysia. It is found Malaysia has a competitive sustainable tourism plan, which has a strong linkage with the goals of public, private and NGOs’ goal on socio-economic development. However there is a significant gap in incorporating policies on the macro level of the tourism system