Lai introducing the heritage trail to some foreign tourists at Hotel Sandakan
SANDAKAN : – The Founder and Chairman of Sandakan Heritage Trail, Lai King Hang expresses his satisfaction and acknowledges the easy availability of the Sandakan Heritage Trail maps sponsored by Sabah Tourism Board mid last year has exposed more visitors to Sandakan doing the self-guided walk.
FREE maps can now be obtained from the Arrival Hall of Sandakan Airport and major hotels in Sandakan.
Sandakan Heritage Trail is a community volunteer programme started in 2003, currently enjoying more visibility post pandemic due to the upgrading of the information boards along the route and greater publicity using the social media.
“Our Facebook page has now ballooned to over 6 thousand followers of late” added Lai.
However as a volunteer group, it has limited resources to determine actually how many tourists are walking the trail.
According to Lai, there is no data available yet to understand the impact of this tourism product to the overall development of Sandakan Tourism.
It was reported recently by the Ministry Of Tourism, Culture and Environment Sabah that a total of 3.14 million tourists visited Sabah in 2024, an increased of 20.4% over 2023 but there is no mention of number of tourists visiting Sandakan.
“Sandakan being one of the active tourism destinations in Sabah should have separate data to enable tourism players and stakeholders here to gauge and plan ahead in view of Visit Malaysia Year 2026 soon” explained Lai.
He further hopes that some of the 550 million allocated by the recent Federal Budget for promoting Visit Malaysia Year 2026 and 110 million for upgrading tourism facilities will be channelled to promote and update tourism infrastructures Sandakan too, on top of the support provided by the State Government.
Lai also thanks the Sandakan Municipal Council for their continuous assistance in maintaining the heritage trail, to give our visitors a glimpse of the past by visiting the 10 main heritage sites as indicated in the map.
