24 November
MANDALAY Region’s Direc-torate of Hotels and Tourism is planning to relax visa restrictions for certain countries, in a bid to encourage increased arrivals from European countries, as part of its efforts to promote tourism.
“In cooperation with corre-sponding departments, we have submitted our proposal to relax visa restrictions to the tourism development central committee to attract more tourists,” said U San Yu, the Deputy Director of the Directorate of Hotels and Tourism, Mandalay Region.
The Union Government has expanded its trial visa relaxa-tion for one more year, allowing visa—free travel for tourists from South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Macao, and arrival visas for tourists from China and India. The trial visa relaxation began in October 2018.
Myanmar also granted a one year trial arrival visa to India since December 2018, and now has extended it for one more year.
Myanmar also set a trial year starting from October 1st, 2019 and relaxed visas for 6 countries in Europe. Also during this period, tourists from Australia, Germany, Italy, Russia and Swit-zerland have been granted arrival visas, if they enter by air. Myanmar is also planning to relax visa restrictions for other countries.
According to the documents, over 490,000 tourists visited Man-dalay from January to December 2018, and the number jumped to 550,000 this year from January to October.
“Travel entries to Mandalay have risen over 50,000 more than last year in only 10 months, with two months left in the travel season. So it is sure that travel entries in 2019 will be distinct-ly more than last year,” said U San Yu. The entry rates in Mandalay reached 386,031 in 2016, 483,784 in 2017, 492,097 in 2018 and 557,313 in 2019 from Janu-ary to October.—Min Htet Aung (Mandalay sub-printing house) (Translated by Hay Mar )
