Muslim Friendly Tourism:
Developing and Marketing MFT Products and Services
In the OIC Member Countries
54
Figure 16: OIC Countries Halal Travel Indicator (HTI) 2015/2016 Scores
Source: SGIE Report 2015/2016
The previous chart clearly shows the vast variance between OIC countries in terms of
development of the MFT sector. A few countries are performing really well while most OIC
countries are performing poorly. The average HTI score for OIC countries was 20; the highest
score, that of Malaysia, was 85.5. UAE came next with a score of 70 while all other OIC
countries scored below 45. Fifteen OIC countries, which are not shown in the graph, scored
below 10 on the HTI including Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Mauritania, Somalia, Guyana,
Comoros, Togo, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Chad, Nigeria, Djibouti, Guinea-Bissau, Tajikistan,
and Turkmenistan. The four raw indicators show similar patterns with a few exceptions as in
the case of the Maldives scoring quite highly on the social indicator due to its reliance on
employment in the Tourism sector and Kyrgyzstan financial indicator due to the high number
of inbound Muslim tourists in relation to the country’s size. As expected, many OIC countries
have a better performance on governance indicator which represents the degree of Halal-
friendliness of their ecosystem.