Entering the 3rd week Malaysia opened the country's border gates and it has benefited Capital A Bhd as well as its parent company AirAsia Avation Group.
However, there are still many rules that need to be followed and standard operating procedures (SOPs) that need to be followed involving travel across the country.
Because of that, Capital A’s Chief Commercial Officer, Colin Currie, called on Asian countries in particular, to relax more international travel regulations to help economic recovery.
According to him, Asian countries recorded a high percentage of vaccination rates, so it was time to review the barriers that burden air travel including test requirements before and during arrival, additional paperwork as well as expensive Covid travel insurance.
Clearly, the tourism sector contributes 13% to aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) and 6% of total employment for most Asian countries, so the recovery of the sector is important to support the lives of the people.
In addition, AirAsia Aviation Group CEO Bo Lingam added that he was saddened when airfare was much cheaper than the price for the Covid-19 test required by most Asian countries, thus making the overall cost of air travel a burden.
He added that he was very happy with the flexibility given by Cambodia and India which abolished the test requirement and reduced the application of paperwork while other countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Australia and the Philippines only implemented the test requirement once.
It is common knowledge that for almost 2 years the tourism and aviation sectors have been severely affected by the Covid-19 panemic outbreak.
The reopening of the border has given new light to the 2 sectors, but there are still some obstacles that are subtly a factor of difficulty for the sector to grow in helping the economic recovery.
Meanwhile, as of noon yesterday, Capital A shares were up 0.5 sen or 0.70% at 70 sen with a market capitalization value of RM2.93 billion.
