Ammar Roslizar began his career as a self-employed tourist guide, along with his partners Amir, Dr. Aizuddin, and Ammar Shahrin. This knowledge allowed them to acquire local information. Upon returning home, they discovered that the packages offered by Malaysian Travel Agencies forget local experiences, without there being a differentiator between them.
Ammar Roslizar and his partners lacked formal experience in the tourism industry, but visualizing an opportunity. They decided to create their own travel packages and eliminate the typical tourist traps on the itinerary, such as compulsory shopping points.
Roslizar and his partners founded ARBA Travel & Tours in 2014; a travel company focused on halal tourism. Malaysians loved this new perspective, so products were able to penetrate the market much faster. On the other hand, they also have the advantage of being able to communicate with providers in their mother tongue, having the opportunity to get better deals.
Roslizar and his partners decided to focus the company on Halal tourism – tourism designed for those seeking to follow the practices of Islam and the Koranic law in their travels. This approach has allowed ARBBA to penetrate a market large enough and expanding, rather than competing in a market that is dying.
For Roslizar, halal tourism is part of ARBA Travel’s core business, not a competitive advantage or differentiator. The competitive advantage of ARBA is the hospitality “Budi,” a Malay word that translates as “the perfection of the human being.” This philosophy has led them to obtain a satisfaction rating of 4.8 / 5, a high rank in the service industry. Also, ARBA has systematized operations through an Artificial Intelligence program called Lisa. This AI program executes daily repetitive tasks with customer inputs, thus confirming the booking and checking that there are seats available. Lisa also provides the leading team with updates for monitoring and tracking the progress and performance of each of the departments.
Currently, ARBA has a roadmap for 2023, where they aim to create a hotel chain. Now, ARBA is in a stage of building an infrastructure for customers. Ells hope to become a leading brand for halal tourism in 2023. In 2021, they will seek to diversify into new travel submarkets.
Ammar Roslizar is one of the youngest nominees for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Malaysia 2018 award. He and his partners also appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list (Asia).
The Ammar team strongly believes in business with purpose, which is why they created the ARBA Foundation intending to help the neediest communities where the company operates. ARBA headquarters are located in Kuala Lumpur, and ARBA has three offices in Kota Kinabalu, Seoul and Istanbul.
Within two years, they expect halal tourism to represent 13% of the global travel industry. This branch of the sector has a much higher growth rate than the industry as a whole. Therefore, in ARBA, they predict a promising future in Halal tourism. One of its current challenges is to improve Halal’s perception to become a globally accepted premium standard.
