Issues of Safety and Security: New Challenging to Malaysia Tourism Industry

School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Penang, Malaysia

Abstract

The safety and security issues nowadays become one of the forces causing changes in tourism industry in era of millennium. The main concern of this issues more focus on crime rates, terrorism, food safety, health issues and natural disaster. This topic gained the popularity in tourism research after 9/11 tragedy and since then the academicians and practitioners started seeking the best solution in ways to mitigate these negative impacts. For Malaysia, the image as safety and secure destination was tarnished a few years lately and new unfortunates incident in this year bring more damage to Malaysia image. Healthy issues, terrorism, Lahad Datu intrusion, repeated kidnapping and shooting in Sabah, twin airlines incident, riot and illegal demonstration and false reporting by international media brings new challenging to Malaysia. Although some incident may be had short-term impact to Malaysia tourism industry, but it’s still gave the big impact to Malaysia branding process. Many travellers and Malaysian itself still believe that Malaysia is a one of safer destination and country to visit and stayed in, but more outstanding efforts was require to make sure Malaysia tourism industry was capable to recover from this negative impact as soon as possible.