Malaysia has further extended the recovery movement control order (RMCO) to December 31, 2020, while the ban on international tourists will remain in place, as Covid-19 cases across the globe continue to surge.
The RMCO, which kicked in on June 10, was slated to end on August 31. Speaking at a televised address on Friday (August 28), prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin said: “Our country is still facing challenges in curbing the spread of Covid-19, which is still actively spreading around the world.
“We cannot risk taking this super-spreading virus lightly in the country. Therefore, stricter quarantine rules at certain locations will continue to be enforced.”
While most economic sectors have been allowed to operate, nightclubs and entertainment centres remain closed as new norms would be difficult to implement in these venues.
Muhyiddin also said that foreign tourists will not be allowed to enter Malaysia for now to prevent imported cases into the country.
In a press conference on Friday, senior minister (security cluster) Ismail Sabri Yaakob echoed this further. He was quoted by The Star as saying: “For now, Malaysia is not ready to open our borders to foreign tourists. Even between Malaysia and Singapore, we only allow people from two categories (to travel), including our citizens who had been stranded in Singapore.
“The other category is for those (from Singapore) who are permitted to enter Malaysia for business-to-business purposes, such as attending meetings in Kuala Lumpur.
“Opening our border to tourists from other countries is the last thing we will look into. Apart from requests from restaurant workers from Thailand and domestic workers from Indonesia (to enter the country), we also received a request from AirAsia (to allow commercial air travel).
“At the moment, Malaysia will not grant approval to any of the requests.”
Property management system specialist Hotelogix, distribution company AxisRooms, and guest experience management platform RepUp have merged to become Hotelogix PTE, headquartered in Singapore.
Under this three-way merger, hospitality solutions will be reimagined and delivered by this integrated platform covering operations, distribution, reputation, marketing automation, and guest-facing technologies.
The merger has given Hotelogix PTE an aggregate customer base spanning more than 100 countries, powering over 10,000 hospitality businesses ranging from hotels, resorts, boutique hotels, hostels to aparthotels, campsites, villas, vacation rentals, independents, and chains.
With more than 200 employees, the new entity has emerged as one of the largest SaaS providers for the hospitality sector in the Asia-Pacific market and aims at aggregating over 20,000 customers in the next three years.
Hotels today use multiple systems through a guest’s lifecycle, from pre-booking to post-checkout stages, which then require integration of various systems leading to high costs, broken experience, delayed implementation, and fragmented support, said Hotelogix PTE in a statement.
As such, the core objective of the merger is to “harness the power of data across operations, distribution and customer experience systems to deliver exceptional value and seamless experience to its clients’ customers”.
Aditya Sanghi, who will continue to be the CEO at Hotelogix, said: “With this merger, we will have a wide range of solutions to offer which will give superior value to our customers and increase our share of wallet. This definitely gives us a huge competitive edge against our competitors at a global level.”
Anil Kumar Prasanna, CEO at AxisRooms, added: “The future of hotel technology needs to be open and accessible to every hotel partner or technology provider. If hotels want the full range of services or just a part of the stack, we want the technology to integrate as seamlessly as possible and be available to all partners with this merger.”
Accel Partners, Vertex Ventures, Saama Capital and Seedfund are among existing investors of the companies which are backing this merger.