Sarawak now has 1,000 Grab drivers under our Sarawak Tourism Ambassadors Programme

Kudos to Sarawak Tourism Board (STB) for having cer­ti­fied 1,000 Grab driv­ers for e-learn­ing un­der their pro­gramme to groom as ‘Sarawak tourism am­bas­sadors’. I hoped that all e-hail­ing driv­ers concerned would be an asset to us after being equipped with the knowl­edge to be shared with our future vis­i­tors once the bor­ders are open. Similarly, for our ‘Sarawak Am­bas­sadors Pro­gramme’ to suc­ceed, we also need solid sup­port from all the in­dus­try and the tourism play­ers.

We thank Grab Malaysia who had collaborated with STB to ensure the success of the ‘Sarawak Am­bas­sadors Pro­gramme which is tar­get­ing the first 1,000 out of 5,000 e-hail­ing driv­ers based in Kuch­ing, Sibu, Bin­tulu and Miri. The pro­gramme for Co­hort 2 com­menced im­me­di­ately af­ter STB had at­tained the first 1,000 driv­ers.

The programme is avail­able in English, Ba­hasa Malaysia and Man­darin with the mod­ules cover key in­for­ma­tion about Sarawak, its cul­ture and her­itage as well as the tourist des­ti­na­tions in all re­gions – namely the state’s south­ern, cen­tral and north­ern zones. The par­tic­i­pat­ing e-hail­ing driv­ers would have ac­cess to Grab Malaysia’s ‘Ax­onify’ – its e-learn­ing plat­form set up un­der Grab Academy.

The fa­cil­i­ta­tor of the mod­ules is Akademi Hospi­tal­iti & Pe­lan­con­gan Sau­jana Sdn Bhd (SATT Col­lege) cov­er­ing the south­ern, cen­tral and the north­ern re­gions of Sarawak. 

At the same time, I have called on all of our tourism play­ers and part­ners to come for­ward to­gether as ‘one big tourism fam­ily’ in em­bracing the new pro­grammes and ini­tia­tives in­tro­duced amidst the Covid-19 pan­demic. The pan­demic can be seen as a per­fect op­por­tu­nity for in­dus­try play­ers to re­think tourism in Sarawak. Thus, I am con­fi­dent that the mea­sures put in place by our gov­ern­ment would shape the ‘tourism of to­mor­row’ and also Sarawak.

This is equally important because as cus­to­di­ans of Sarawak tourism, we are con­tin­u­ously strate­gis­ing and re-strate­gis­ing to pre­pare and en­sure com­pre­hen­sive tourism re­cov­ery plans. We are also do­ing all there is to im­prove and re­build des­ti­na­tions, to en­cour­age in­no­va­tion, and re-think the tourism sec­tor, while fac­ing chal­lenges dur­ing this pan­demic.

I also expressed hope that as Sarawak would move to this ‘re­cov­ery’ phase, busi­nesses would be up and run­ning – ‘slowly but surely'. We must continue to be­lieve that with ev­ery chal­lenge and strug­gle that the peo­ple were cur­rently fac­ing, there was ‘al­ways light at the end of the tun­nel’. At the min­istry, we have taken sev­eral mea­sures to im­ple­ment strin­gent stan­dard op­er­at­ing pro­ce­dures (SOP) and the new norms in trav­el­ling are be­ing put in place. Thus, we are also col­lab­o­rat­ing with in­dus­try play­ers to de­vise plans to help sus­tain tourism busi­nesses in Sarawak.