Indonesia expects visitors from the Philippines, India and Russia - previously not among the nation's main sources of foreign tourists - to help jack up foreign tourist arrivals to reach 7 million.
This year it is estimated that up to 6.4 million tourists will visit the country.
"According to our internal research, the three countries were like *sleeping giants', since they have so much potential that we haven't explored," the Culture and Tourism Ministry's director general for marketing Sapta Nirwandar said Tuesday.
The three countries will be targeted by the ministry's promotion campaigns, along with countries that usually have been the traditional foreign tourist markets such as Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Australia, China, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
In 2008, 195,675 Indian tourists visited Indonesia, of which 50,194 arrived in Jakarta, and 28,078 in Bali.
"As we will seriously promote Indonesian tourism in India, we target 180,000 tourists from the country in 2010," Sapta said.
The ministry set a target of 63,000 tourists from Russia in 2010 and 169,951 tourists from the Philippines. These figures are lower than the number of visitors from the two countries in 2008, taking into account the global downturn.
"The Philippines and Russia, again based on our research, are among the countries where the financial crisis affected their citizens greatly. So despite the low figures, our targets are actually pretty optimistic," he said.
Speaking about the promotional methods to be used, Sapta said that the government would now shift the promotion focus from placing advertisements in the media to community-based promotion.
"The community based approach is far less money-consuming but has better market penetration," he said.
By using the method, the government will focus on the characteristics of tourists from each of the originating countries and build community groups based on this.
"For example, Malaysian tourists love to shop in Bandung, so we will build community groups of Malaysian and feed them with updated information about the city."
Sapta claimed that the growth of foreign tourists in Indonesia in 2009 was better than those of other Southeast Asian countries.
"Our growth was 2.9 percent while Malaysia's was 2.1 percent. Even Singapore suffered negative growth in foreign tourist arrivals." (bbs)
