S

eek and you will find. That saying, however, loses its merit when one tries to find information on Indonesian tourism on the web.

A simple search on the world’s largest travel website, TripAdvisor, for a restaurant in Wakatobi, Southeast Sulawesi, which is one of the government’s new hottest tourist destinations, will yield zero results.

The scarcity of information, if it continues, will mar the government’s efforts to attract 20 million foreign tourists by 2019.

TripAdvisor Asia Pacific head of destination marketing Sarah Matthews said that because traveling itself could be expensive, information should be made available online to help people make decisions.

Digital content and online information about a place, as well as the experience of other website users, could be effective tools to attract tourists to specific places, especially those that lie beyond major destinations like Jakarta and Bali.

“You need to tell me why I should come to your destination, and it really can’t just be from the ministry itself. It needs regional offices to do that together,” she said at a recent event.

“The only way to get travelers to discover Raja Ampat [in Papua] or other places in Indonesia is by making sure your content is rich and making sure that travelers advocate it.”

The Tourism Ministry says it is aware of the situation.

Tourism Minister Arief Yahya acknowledged that digital marketing was more effective than conventional media and said the ministry felt compelled to do more in a bid to impact consumer choices.

The budget allocation for digital marketing is now equal to that for conventional marketing at around Rp 850 billion (US$64.94 million) this year, an improvement from a ratio of 40:60 for digital marketing and conventional marketing in 2015.

However, Arief admitted that recent government budget cuts, which reduced the ministry’s overall budget to Rp 3.4 trillion from Rp 5.4 trillion, would affect the scale of promotion activities.

Tourism has been dubbed one of five priority sectors to be developed by the government. The target for 2016 is to draw in 12 million foreign tourists, up from 10 million last year. The figure is expected to double to 20 million tourists by 2019.

Association of Indonesian Tour and Travel Agencies (Asita) chairman Asnawi Bahar said its regional offices had not fully ventured into digital marketing. “They do have websites, but they don’t have online [marketing]. Everything is carried out by the ministry,” he said.

The government has started to establish partnerships with digital media firms to promote tourism, such Chinese search engine Baidu, tech giant Google and TripAdvisor, with the latter providing special advertisement pages for destinations like Lombok in West Nusa Tenggara.

National flag carrier Garuda Indonesia service director Nicodemus P. Lampe said what the airline expected from the government was a consistent and focused marketing effort, especially for the 10 emerging tourist destinations.

“They should focus and be consistent. Because if [the campaign] just lasts for two months, it will be a weak effort,” Nicodemus said.

Tourism observer Azril Ashari, meanwhile, warned of a possible downside to aggressive digital marketing. He mentioned the example of Manado, North Sulawesi, which, after a surge of chartered flights from Chinese cities to the town, had seen many Chinese tourists visit the area every month.

“But the airport there is not big enough, and there aren’t enough buses to carry the tourists. If they get disappointed, will that not taint our country’s image?” he asked.