Why 'Visit Indonesia 2008'?

Erlin Sarwin ,  Zurich   |  Fri, 10/10/2008 10:49 AM  |  Opinion

Having seen "Incredible India", "Malaysia Truly Asia" and the other tourism advertisements on CNN, from Croatia to the Maldives, many wonder what happened to "Visit Indonesia 2008".

Knowing that we can nowadays google almost anything, I finally found the official Visit Indonesia website (http://www.my-indonesia.info). The homepage layout is less than optimal with overcrowded and competing information in the middle, and empty left and right margins.

The homepage also lacks theme and focus and most importantly, does not give key information on how to get to Indonesia, visa requirements, international airport location, vaccinations and medicines required to visit the regions, best time to visit, or safety and cultural issues.

The downloadable brochures triggered by the Promotional Media tabs probably answer some of these questions, but may discourage people like me who are impatient to search and download and who think that Promotional Media only means hotel and tour ads.

Other website pages seem to be under construction (such as links you cannot click on in the Raja Ampat article) or just plain empty (like the romantic getaway tab).

Under the emergency tab, I can only find emergency numbers in Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Bandung, Medan and Denpasar. This shows another lack of coordination between the TV advertisement (which includes Nias and Papua) and the web site, as well as an important infrastructural shortcoming, since no single emergency number can be used by tourists all over the country. This is one of the many things that may disconnect efforts to improve Indonesian tourism from the reality in the field.

Another channel that would be useful to reach out to the international audience would be our embassy websites. When we open a couple of Indonesian embassy websites, the space dedicated to this promotion varies from one country to another. While the Indonesian Embassy in Washington DC allocates half its home page to Visit Indonesia 2008, our office in Switzerland only allocates one spot for a Visit Indonesia logo which links to the official website, without explanation or lead-in.

Should we assume that the Indonesian government targets more American tourists than Swiss? Or is this just a matter of resources available to each embassy? If American tourists are the target, then we should be grateful that at least there has not been any travel warning issued so far to ban people from visiting Indonesia in the United States embassy website.

Whoever chose this oh-so-dry theme "Celebrating 100 years of National Awakening" seems to have slept during the marketing class on how to create a catchy, meaningful and memorable phrase to encourage people to associate Indonesia with visits or tourism.

Does anybody outside Indonesia really care about how many years we have had our National Awakening? And anyway, what has Indonesia awakening got to do with tourism and visiting? There is no clue at all to this.

What could we have done differently?

The first thing that has to be very clear is the objective of Visit Indonesia 2008. Is it just a commemoration of 100 years of Indonesia awakening, as the theme suggests? Then, would this objective be justifiable considering the investment that the government had put in, which could have been used for other and better purposes? Or is this actually meant to promote Indonesian tourism?

At what stage are we talking about Indonesian tourism? Are we trying to create awareness only? If this is the case, why not put more resources into raising awareness by focusing on large-scale information networks to reach the international audience more effectively? Is this because we do not have sufficient funds to do this right? Many other questions follow.

Our objectives should be reflected in performance indicators that can be quantified or rated. This not only relates to the results or impacts we want to achieve, but also allows us to compare these with the amount of effort or resources we put into it. Lack of planning and uncoordinated efforts usually lead to difficulty in assessing the total costs of our efforts and often gives misleading indicators on levels of achievement. Promoting Indonesian tourism is not the sole responsibility of the Tourism Board, but should be coordinated with other departments.

When we do sufficient research and benchmarking, we could probably be more realistic and consider reducing our scope either to more specific tourism objectives over the next few years (for example, during one year we could concentrate on a couple of provinces), rather than launching a big scale project that is doomed to failure because we are just not ready to implement it.

When we have a clear strategy and when we have decided to implement this strategy, then let's be professional and hire qualified and experienced people who can deliver the needed results to best promote this country.

The writer enjoys traveling and currently lives in Switzerland. She can be reached at airline_serene@yaw.cam

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