Tourism Malaysia is close to tying up with Indian Airlines and SriLankan Airlines to offer competitively priced tour packages to travellers from India as part of efforts to revive tourist traffic to the south-east Asian nation, hit by the recent SARS epidemic and the war in Iraq.

It is also spending about $1 million, with the majority allocated for India, in the sub-continent for a multimedia advertising blitz over the next few months, Tourism Malaysia director P Manoharan said.

"We will be finalising the packages with IA and SriLankan Airlines within the next few weeks," Manoharan said.

A total of 183,000 Indian tourists travelled to Malaysia in 2002, up from 143,000 in the previous year.

"There was a 25-30 per cent drop in tourist traffic due to SARS. Now, we are coming out with these various packages to induce people to travel there," he said, adding that the number of foreign tourists travelling to Malaysia dropped by one million to 12 million people in 2002.

The new alliances would be made following encouraging response received to some packages launched recently in alliance with Malaysia Airlines, Star Cruises and Singapore Airlines for the Indian market, he said.

With the new packages, Tourism Malaysia hopes to catch up on the slack demand during the summer season by attracting more travellers.

Manoharan said negotiations were also on with various Indian corporates to organise group travel of company officials to Malaysia for meetings or other purposes.