Inexpensive tickets: Visitors flood the Garuda Indonesia Travel Fair 2018 in Jakarta on Friday
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Alya Lutfiyyah plans to visit Labuan Bajo in East Nusa Tenggara with seven friends in July.
She made up her mind to go there after browsing through photos of the destination on Instagram.
“Labuan Bajo seems to be really beautiful. I’d rather go to Labuan Bajo than Singapore or Malaysia,” Alia said during her search for cheap tickets at the Garuda Travel Fair (GATF) in the Jakarta Convention Center.
The 16-year-old high-school student’s decision was strengthened by promotional fares offered at the travel fair.
A Jakarta-Labuan Bajo round-trip ticket was discounted to slightly more than Rp 1 million (US$70), from Rp 3 million.
The mushrooming number of travel fairs like the GATF might help lure vacationers like Alya to the country’s emerging tourist destinations, including Labuan Bajo, a fishing town on the western-most tip of Flores Island.
Held twice a year since 2008, the GATF is organized by national flag carrier Garuda Indonesia.
In its first installment this year, which runs from April 6 to April 8 in Jakarta and another 28 cities earlier in March, the airline offers discounted tickets for flights covering 68 domestic destinations and 22 international
destinations.
Price reductions may reach 80 percent of original fares, through which Garuda intends to attract 80,000 visitors to the fair.
Garuda said that it particularly aimed at exposing interested travelers to emerging tourist destinations, dubbed the “10 new Balis”, including Labuan Bajo, Tanjung Kelayang in Bangka Belitung, Lake Toba in North Sumatra and Wakatobi in Southeast Sulawesi, offering special promotional fares.
“I think that [new destinations], from Labuan Bajo and Lombok [in West Nusa Tenggara], have become people’s new favorites, apart from Bali,” Garuda Indonesia president director Pahala N. Mansury said on Friday.
“[Therefore,] we are offering special prices [for these destinations],” he added.
The airline seeks to garner no less than Rp 285 billion worth of sales transactions in Jakarta alone, and another Rp 531 billion nationwide, in the two-day event, up by more than 10 percent from the first fair held last year.
Pahala declined to elaborate on the details, but said that most transactions would be driven by domestic routes.
According to travel firm PT Panorama JTB travel manager Frida Zubaidah, among the emerging domestic routes, Labuan Bajo had become a new favorite, and promotional fares provided by travel fairs played a big role in promoting the picturesque town.
“Certainly, the government is developing this tourist destination. But, promotional [flight] tickets and cashbacks [play a role, too] because the original fare is very expensive,” she said.
Frida also concurred that many customers preferred visiting Labuan Bajo to traveling abroad, and the trend had on the rise for two to three years.
Separately, Tourism Minister Arief Yahya said that increasing sales at travel fairs reflected a growing demand for leisure among Indonesians.
“The leisure economy is prospering, especially among millennials,” he said.
Arief also pointed out that Indonesian tourism welcomed 14 million foreign visitors last year, up nearly 22 percent.
The growth rate is nearly four times the country’s economic expansion of 5.07 percent, he added.
Tourism has been one of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s priorities since the start of his term in October 2014, with the goal to turn the sector into a top contributor to the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 2019, when it is expected to welcome 20 million foreign visitors.
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