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Photo taken from Asian Wanderlust[/caption]
LANGKAWI (Bernama) - Winning a Malaysia Tourism Council’s (MTC) Gold Award recently came as a boost for Taman Buaya Langkawi Sdn Bhd, but their mission is not done yet.
Its general manager, Adam Fuaad (rpt: Fuaad) said as the operator of the Crocodile Adventureland Langkawi, the country’s largest crocodile farm located at Jalan Teluk Datai here, it was great to win an award at a time when the competition to bring tourists in had becoming intensive.
“I am glad that we won the award but at the same time, the expectation would get higher. We just could not afford to stop thinking about better ways to promote our only product here … which is crocodile,” he told Bernama recently.
Besides winning the MTC award for the eco tourism category last October, Crocodile Adventureland Langkawi, which had been recognised by the Malaysia Book of Records as the country’s largest crocodile farm, also received an excellence award from global travel review website, TripAdvisor, earlier this year.
“Definitely these achievements would give us some edge in our continuous promotion of our product, not only to tap the domestic market but also to expose the product further in the international market,” he said.
While not expecting the number of visitors to the farm this year to surpass the 150,000 that was recorded last year, Adam said their preferred target for 2018 was more on getting tourists to take up the premium packages that they offered.
He said sales for the premium packages had been encouraging as tourists who came in included those who wanted to experience the adventure offered at the farm, as well as to purchase leather products available at its specialised boutique shop.
“While there may have been some decline in the number of tourists like from Russia or Saudi Arabia, we have noted a drastic increase of tourists from India and Iraq this year,” he said, but he was not able to divulge the figure off hand.
Apart from improving the landscape of the farm which accommodates over 4,000 crocodiles coming from six species, Adam said more interactive activities, including the usage of smartphone applications would be introduced to promote their products and packages.
“We also want this place to continue to be a learning and research centre, particularly for university students as well as to share our crocodile handling expertise with other organisations,” he added.
- BERNAMA
