Rebuilding Fraser's Hill: The Case for Slow Tourism

12 Aug 2026

8 Min Read

Dr Khairiah Ismail (Academic Contributor), Dr Muhammad Afnan Mahusain (Academic Contributor), The Taylor's Team (Impact Office), The Taylor's Team (Editor)

IN THIS ARTICLE

Fraser's Hill received about 127,600 visitors in 2017. By 2024 the figure was closer to 49,400. One of Malaysia's original hill stations, with more than a century of standing behind it, lost roughly six visitors in every ten within a decade.

There are several reasons that contributed to this. The road up is long and narrow. The accommodation stock aged. Genting sits closer to Kuala Lumpur, and Cameron Highlands offers more to do once you arrive. Each of these carries weight, and any one of them would slow a destination down.

To understand what sat behind the decline, the Sustainable Tourism Impact Lab at Taylor's University began working at Fraser's Hill in 2025, through site visits and stakeholder discussions with the agencies, operators and residents who run the place. The answer it arrived at reframes what destination rejuvenation actually requires.

Who Fraser's Hill Was Built For, and Who Comes Now

Fraser's Hill was built for a particular kind of visitor and served that visitor for a long time. Government agencies, government-linked companies and domestic holidaymakers made up the bulk of its traffic, and the destination's facilities were shaped around them.

Over the past decade the effort has been to widen that base and position the hill as a nature tourism destination in its own right. According to Dr Muhammad Afnan Mahusain, Deputy Director of the Sustainable Tourism Impact Lab, the services, activities and supporting infrastructure did not keep pace with how visitor expectations moved during the same period. Tourism assets fell into underuse, and some were abandoned outright. Only recently has the state begun handing several of these properties to private operators to bring back into service.

Portrait Photo for Dr Muhammad Afnan Mahusain

_{Dr Muhammad Afnan Mahusain, Deputy Director of the Sustainable Tourism Impact Lab}

The Lab's own research supports the picture, finding domestic visitors asking for more to do and a wider range of food and beverage options than the destination currently offers.

That demand, however, arrives on a schedule local businesses struggle to build on. Most visitors are domestic and come at the weekend, mainly in family groups, spending on accommodation and food and beverage. On weekdays the visitor profile changes entirely to nature seekers: hikers, trekkers and birdwatchers. A growing caravan and camping segment brings its own food and equipment, which means its contribution to local businesses is limited.

_{Photo from SCMP.}

For an operator, that pattern is close to unworkable. Fixed costs run seven days while revenue concentrates into two. It is a structure that suppresses investment, because nobody upgrades a kitchen or trains a team on the strength of Saturday alone.

It also explains the labour position, which is more specific than a general shortage. Operators told the team that holding on to skilled staff is harder than hiring in the first place. Younger workers leave for larger towns offering better pay and clearer progression, and businesses lean on multi-skilled employees and seasonal hires to cover peaks. That is the labour market a weekend economy produces, and it places a ceiling on the service standards those businesses can offer.

Everyone Has a Plan

The more consequential factor lies beyond infrastructure and competition. It is, in Dr Afnan's words, ‘not the lack of vision, but the lack of coordinated execution.’ The ingredients for a leading sustainable highland destination are all present, on his reading. The difficulty comes in turning them into tangible tourism products, visitor experiences and initiatives that hold over time.

The structural reason that sits underneath this is that Fraser's Hill answers to multiple government agencies, local authorities, private operators and community stakeholders at once. Its geography compounds the problem, since the destination spans both Pahang and Selangor and therefore falls across two state jurisdictions.

Several of those parties hold a plan for Fraser's Hill. Responsibility for the destination is distributed across them rather than concentrated in one place, which makes coordinated execution difficult even where intentions align. Each optimises within its own remit, and the destination as a whole moves slowly, or moves in directions that partly cancel out.

Which constraint should be tackled first when progress elsewhere depends on it? In Dr Afnan's assessment, alignment comes before anything physical. It would be a matter of ‘getting everyone on the same page,’ he says, in a destination with many passionate people and organisations and as many sets of priorities among them.

Putting All in One Place

This is the problem Festival Hijau Bukit Fraser was built to address. Held in July 2026, the festival is the second initiative under the Emerald Project, a long-term framework conceived by the Lab to revitalise Fraser's Hill as a sustainable highland destination. The idea took shape during a series of strategic discussions with Trinidad Hospitality Sdn Bhd, an industry partner managing several properties on the hill, around a shared recognition that the destination needed a coordinated roadmap in place of a succession of isolated tourism activities.

Formalised through a five-year Memorandum of Understanding between the School of Hospitality, Tourism and Events, the Lab and Trinidad Hospitality, with destination-level support from Tourism Pahang and Majlis Daerah Raub, the framework runs as three connected initiatives. EcoPulse came first, mapping visitor motivations and sustainability expectations at Fraser's Hill. Festival Hijau translated those findings into activity. Project Dahlia, focused on strengthening the destination's environmental identity and community-based tourism development, follows.

Read as an event, the festival was three days of workshops, a charity run, a treasure hunt and community programming. Read as an intervention, it was an attempt to put agencies, operators, guides, residents and visitors in the same place at the same time and give them a shared objective to work on. In Dr Afnan's experience, once people believe in the same direction, everything after that becomes much easier to build.

Taylor's hospitality student participating in the event

What makes this more than aspiration is what surprised the team most. Organisations that rarely work together began solving problems collectively rather than operating as separate agencies. For a destination whose diagnosed constraint is coordination, that is the outcome that matters, and it is not one an operator training programme or a product development grant would have produced.

The festival's operational delivery ran through the School's curriculum rather than alongside it. Around 40 students from the Bachelor of International Events Management worked across two modules, 18 second-year students in Events Operation under Ms Dhiya Hikmahana Abdul Razak and 22 third-year students in Live Event Project under Dr Khairiah Ismail, handling planning, sponsorship, logistics, registration, volunteer coordination, marketing, stakeholder engagement, operations, risk management and post-event evaluation.

Slow Tourism and What It Demands Locally

The model the Emerald Project is working towards is slow tourism, built on longer stays, greater local spending and deeper engagement with a place than conventional sightseeing produces. Applied to Fraser's Hill, it means repositioning the destination as high-value and low-volume, aimed at nature immersion travellers, birdwatchers, wellness seekers, active seniors and other special-interest visitors who want authentic engagement with nature and community.

Longer stays are what make this work commercially. A visitor who stays several nights rather than one spends on weekdays as well, which gives operators the steadier trade the weekend pattern denies them.

It also requires local businesses to charge more than they do now, which is not a decision they can take on their own. Around ten SMEs took part in the festival's stakeholder workshops, spanning accommodation and transport providers, cafés, restaurants, homestays, food entrepreneurs, tour operators, nature guides, craft producers and community organisations, working through what visitors now expect and what would have to change in their own offer to meet it.

Asked what stood in their way, the operators put product readiness ahead of marketing. Their assessment was that visitors increasingly expect a memorable experience rather than a bed and a meal, and that their current offer is not yet built for that expectation. It matches what EcoPulse recorded on the visitor side, with both ends of the transaction describing the same gap.

Dr Afnan puts the order plainly. Pricing should reflect the whole visitor experience rather than the individual product, and improvement has to come first in food and beverage quality, service standards, infrastructure, visitor facilities and accessibility. The price follows the experience, and attempting it in the other order produces resistance and little else.

Boutique hotels, homestays, cafés, restaurants, local food producers, licensed nature guides, heritage interpreters, wellness operators and locally owned retail stand to gain, since longer stays distribute spending more widely than day visits do and experience-led visitors buy from more categories of business. The exposure sits at the budget end, where traditional campsites competing primarily on price face slower growth in a market moving upmarket around them, though the Lab sees a route through repositioning towards premium eco-camping or glamping rather than away from camping altogether.

What Comes Next on the Roadmap

The 2026 edition drew approximately 500 attendee visits, and that is the base the next one has to build from. The improvements identified for 2027 point in a consistent direction: a longer programme of four to five days, more community-owned activities, more SMEs, wellness programming, international participation, and considerably better measurement including visitor impact and carbon footprint.

The single most consequential outcome of the festival is that Tourism Pahang has indicated it wants Festival Hijau to become an annual signature event, and has supported establishing a formal Emerald Project steering committee spanning government, industry, academia and community.

For a destination whose diagnosed problem is distributed responsibility, a standing body with a mandate to coordinate across all of them is the actual deliverable.

The Sustainable Tourism Impact Lab works with industry, government and community partners to advance destination research and sustainable tourism development. To explore collaboration opportunities, contact us at impactlab@taylors.edu.my

LEARN MORE ABOUT TAYLOR'S IMPACT LABS

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