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Govt focuses on four strategies to attract foreign visitors
Indonesia faces a tough year in tourism, as growth in foreign arrivals dropped to the lowest rate in years in the first four months of the year
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Indonesia faces a tough year in tourism, as growth in foreign arrivals dropped to the lowest rate in years in the first four months of the year.
The Tourism Ministry is pursuing four main strategies in a bid to increase the number of tourists coming to the country in the remainder of the year, namely promoting border tourism, making special offers, developing tourist hubs and establishing low-cost carrier terminals (LCCT).
Tourism Minister Arif Yahya said the ministry had nine strategies in total, but for the time being it would apply these four main strategies to attract foreign tourists.
For the border tourism strategy, he said, he would take advantage of the proximity — both geographic and emotional — of some neighboring countries. Such a strategy was applied by many countries in Europe and Southeast Asia, such as Malaysia.
“We focus on border tourism to attract foreign tourists from Singapore and Malaysia,” Arief Yahya said last Monday.
Meanwhile, for special offers, the government would encourage companies involved in tourism to provide discounts to attract visitors in low seasons, he said, adding that the third strategy was to make Singapore and Malaysia hubs for Indonesian tourism to attract tourists from India and China, given the shortage of direct flight routes between Indonesia and those countries.
As for the fourth strategy, the government would ask airlines to offer more low-cost services, because many foreign tourists preferred budget carriers for visiting Indonesia, he said, adding that his office would also propose opening more terminals for low-cost carriers to support that effort.
Statistics Indonesia (BPS) data published on Monday reveal that the total number of tourists rose to 5.12 million people in the January-April period, up only 3.22 percent from the 4.96 million people recorded in the same period last year. That marks the lowest growth rate in the last four years for tourist arrivals in the first third of the year.
Growth peaked at 23 percent in January-April of 2017, when about 9.67 million tourists arrived, up from around 8 million in the corresponding period of 2016. It then slowly decreased to 13.7 percent in January-April 2018 and from there fell further to 3.2 percent in the same period this year.
The minister said that the lingering impact of natural disasters last year was one of the factors hitting tourist arrivals in this year’s first quarter. He said even the 1.3 million tourists in April was below the monthly target of 1.5 million, which was set in line with the 17 million people targeted for this year.
The ministry earlier projected the number of foreign tourist arrivals would reach 20 million people this year, but later cut the target to 17 million people.
BPS head Suhariyanto said the 2.74 percent monthly decrease in April was due to seasonal factors, because fewer tourists generally visited the country in that month. Most of the foreign tourists during the month came from Malaysia, China, Singapore, Timor Leste or Australia.
Indonesian Tourism Scholars Association president Azril Azahari said the government had an “unrealistic” target from the outset. The association’s own projection was for a maximum 2 percent increase each year since 2014, which amounts to no more than 18.94 million by the end of 2019.
He said the government should stop blaming natural disasters as the cause of slowdown, as the country had long been exposed to such hazards. Instead, he blamed Indonesia’s failure to follow global tourism trends as the decisive factor for disappointing tourist arrivals.
Since 2010, he explained, tourists’ travel priorities for scenic beaches and a tropical climate had changed into sustainable community-centered tourism and “spirituality”, with popular films like Eat, Pray, Love depicting Bali’s serenity as a selling point. Thus, he called on the Tourism Ministry to integrate the new trends in its 10 New Balis program to promote ten tourist destinations apart from Bali to shift the focus of tourism away from the tourist-packed island.
In the meantime, instead of frequently launching new programs, he would much rather see the government fix the industry’s current vulnerabilities, including issues regarding safety, hygiene, environmental sustainability and information infrastructure.
