KUALA LUMPUR – Penang’s tourism executive councillor Wong Hon Wai has chastised an article by American daily USA Today which ranked Penang Hill ninth on its list of the world’s biggest “tourist traps”.
The Paya Terubong assemblyman pointed out several shortcomings in the way the review was conducted, including its monolingual data collection, which he said contained “inherent limitations”.
He added that the survey also did not take into account other positive comments towards the state’s attraction spot, which he said outstripped the lukewarm remarks.
“The data collection is monolingual and without other major languages that are used in the region, such as Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin, Tamil, and Arabic,” he said in a statement today.
“There are about two dozen bad reviews, and it (the survey) does not take into consideration many other good reviews about Penang Hill, which has far more numbers than the bad ones.”
Wong said that 47 million tourists have visited Penang Hill since 1923, which indicated an annual footfall of about 1 million tourists.
“Many of them are returning visitors, which shows that they are attracted to the charm of Penang Hill as one of the major attractions. The number of visitors speaks for itself.”
Nonetheless, Wong said the state government will always look for improvement in providing tourists with new experiences in the future, adding that a new cable car project is currently underway.
USA Today ranked Penang Hill ninth on its list of the world’s biggest tourist traps, where it stands as the only Asian attraction in the top 10.
The landmark also ranked 14th and 64th in the “most overrated” and “most overpriced” attractions list, respectively.
USA Today conducted its list by analysing 23.2 million Google reviews of the top 500 tourist attractions in the world as of July this year, and filtered for reviews including the terms “tourist trap”, “overrated”, or “expensive”.
It should be noted that only English reviews were included in USA Today’s analysis, and that the terms were also used in several generally positive reviews – but the daily explained they were not frequent enough to be statistically significant. – September 26, 2023