During a regional summit last week, Coordinating Economic Minister Airlangga Hartarto said six ASEAN countries were working together in subregional groups to set up the VTL in a bid to offset the economic slump that has resulted from plummeting tourist arrivals.

Members of the Brunei-Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines East ASEAN Growth Area (BIMP-EAGA), as well as the Indonesia-Malaysia-Thailand Growth Triangle (IMT-GT), along with Singapore, are currently hashing out the policy.

According to Airlangga, the pandemic has made tourist arrival numbers in the four nations of BIMP-EAGA drop from 29.7 million in 2019 to just 6.2 million last year. The IMT-GT has also seen an equally severe slump from 40 million arrivals in 2019 to 8.2 million in 2020.

But there was still hope for the region, with the Golkar Party politician citing Thailand’s tourist hotspot Phuket as a successful precedent of the quarantine-free policy put in place since July, and how something like it could help boost tourist arrival numbers and incomes for the local economy in neighboring hubs.

“[Thailand] can be an example for Indonesia. Although Indonesia is still relying on the quarantine and PCR [test] policy, there are talks with the IMT-GT, BIMP-EAGA, as well as Singapore for the VTL policy to become a new standard for tourism’s revival,” said the official who is in charge of the pandemic response outside Java and Bali.

One of the biggest “victims” of Indonesia’s insistence on the quarantine rule is Bali. The resort island, whose economy largely depends on tourism, has only seen a slight uptick in foreign tourist arrivals following the island’s reopening on Oct.13, as tourists remained reluctant to be locked up in quarantine for five days.

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