PETALING JAYA: A Penang state executive councillor said an American newspaper’s label of Penang Hill as a “tourist trap” was flawed.
State tourism committee chairman Wong Hon Wai said this in response to a research done by well-known paper USA Today as it only considered English reviews.
The paper published its “Top 100 biggest tourist traps worldwide”, in which Penang Hill was put in the ninth spot and said it came to a conclusion after searching for the phrases “tourist trap”, “overrated” or “expensive” in reviews left on Google in July, after which the paper had divided the number of mentions by the total number of reviews.
“The bad reviews are about two dozen, and it (USA Today) didn’t take into consideration the many other good reviews about Penang Hill – which outnumbers the bad ones,” Wong said in a statement.
He also said there have been nearly 50 million visitors to Penang Hill ever since the funicular railway began in 1923 and over the decades has seen many repeated tourists to the hill.
“This shows that they are attracted to the hill station’s charm. The number of visitors speaks for itself,” he said.
