ASEAN

A newcomer to ASEAN and rich with ambition, Timor-Leste took a new step in its tourism development strategy on May 20th. The country officially launched construction work on its future International Congress Centre in Dili, the capital, in the presence of its prime minister – the very same one who had led the…

The ASEAN Tourism Forum was held at the end of January in Cebu, in the province of Central Visayas. The country's second most populous city, with 965,000 inhabitants and some 2.5 million in its metropolitan area, Cebu is already a heavyweight in Philippine tourism. It receives an average of two million international tourists, while...

Malaysia Airlines is stepping up its international growth strategy, opening new destinations, increasing frequencies and modernising its fleet to meet strong demand in Asia, Australia and Europe. This was the message the airline wanted to get across at the Global Travel Meet 2025 in Kuala Lumpur. During the...

A region of more than 620 million inhabitants whose economic growth has been constant - apart from during the Covid parenthesis. Growth in 2024 was around 4.7% and, according to official institutions, should barely dip in 2025. South-East Asia is proving more than ever to be a land of...

Since the Covid restrictions were lifted, several Asian countries have eased their entry requirements for travellers from France. China has recently done so, and now grants visas without any special preconditions for stays of up to 15 days for tourists or business travellers...

2024 could see the creation of a mega-airline on the Asian continent, a player that would be the equivalent of a few American or Chinese behemoths. This is what the CEO of Capital A Bhd, Tony Fernandes, revealed earlier this week. Capital A Bhd is the holding company that brings together - in a nutshell - all the airlines...

What are Malaysia's ambitions in the MICE segment, and how is the destination developing its offering? Dato' Zamruni Khalid - We are really encouraging the MICE and business travel market in Malaysia, which is also positioning itself as a bleisure destination. Over the next few months and years, we will be...

Whoosh! That's certainly the sound the new high-speed train makes as it travels through the Javanese countryside between Jakarta and Bandung. But what sounds like onomatopoeia is in fact the abbreviation given to the Indonesian high-speed train. "Waktu Hemat, Operasi Optimal, Sistem Handal" means "time saving, optimal operation, reliable system" ....

The results for 2019 are still a long way off for the major airports in South-East Asia. But all the region's hubs returned to growth last year, putting an end to the vertiginous fall in passenger traffic that they had experienced in 2021. On average, passenger traffic at these major airports rose by...

Regulations, regulations and more regulations. Asian governments are fond of them, with the idea of reopening their countries to the outside world. And that's what's happening in South-East Asia. Singapore was the first country to decide to...

We often think that the Asian cities with the best connections from Europe are probably Hong Kong, Shanghai or Tokyo. While these cities offered many direct air routes to Europe, it was in South-East Asia that the greatest number of connections to the old continent were to be found. Until the...

We've been talking about it for several months, but the ASEAN countries seem to be having bad luck with events. Praised by the WHO for its control of the pandemic, the group of ten ASEAN countries (Burma, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) seemed to have the spread of the virus well under control. From March 2020,...

The high-speed rail link between Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and Singapore will remain on the drawing board. It has not been a sea snake, but a land snake for Malaysia and Singapore. The ambitious project for a high-speed train that would cover the 350 km between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore in an hour and a half...

It was a very good year for the Asian hotel industry in 2016. Having become an economic zone at the end of 2015, ASEAN - the Association of Southeast Asian Nations - benefited as much as the rest of the region. At a conference in Bangkok at the end of January, Jesper Palmqvist, STR's Asia analyst, pointed out that growth in the...

Peter Bellew, who took over from Christoph Müller at the helm of Malaysia Airlines on 1 July, has made it clear that the airline will cease to have activities that cost it money. Malaysia Airlines is already starting to turn its head after 30 terrible months of mounting financial losses...

When you think of doing business in ASEAN, Singapore naturally springs to mind, as does Bangkok for companies looking to set up in the Mekong region or Kuala Lumpur, with its ideal geographical location. However, the ASEAN Economic Community is having a similar effect to that of the European Union...

ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, is far from being a newborn. In fact, it will be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2017. From the outset, this grouping of ten countries (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) has thrived on the idea of containment in the face of a threat, whether real or imagined...

GETTING THERE Paris is linked to six ASEAN cities: Bangkok, Jakarta, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Singapore. Other ASEAN capitals and major cities can be reached via the Gulf (Doha or Dubai) or via Bangkok and Singapore. Formalities: Valid passport. Since 2015, visas have been...