On track: Passengers on a Soekarno-Hatta International Airport skytrain. Indonesia has been losing foreign tourists to neighbouring countries, blaming inconvenient visa requirements and limited connectivity between Indonesian tourist spots. – The Jakarta Post
JAKARTA: More than four years after the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on international travel, Indonesia’s crucial tourist industry has yet to recover.According to the latest monthly report from Statistics Indonesia, the number of foreign arrivals to Indonesia this year is 10% below the figure recorded over the same period in 2019.
From January through August 2024, 9.09 million foreign travellers visited the archipelago.
Despite annual increases every year since 2021, that cumulative figure remains below the 10.71 million arrivals recorded over the same eight-month period in 2019.
Similarly, the Immigration Directorate General, which uses a wider measure for the number of visitors, also reported a decrease of foreign arrivals in 2024 compared to the pre-pandemic level in 2019.
While the January to August period of 2019 saw 12 million foreign arrivals, the equivalent period in 2024 recorded approximately nine million, marking a steep drop of 29%.
“The reason why this happened is because, in 2019, we had a free tourist visa for visitors from 169 countries. Now it’s limited to only 13,” said the immigration traffic directorate representative Anggit Suhandono.
“But the impact was that Indonesia was able to push high-quality tourism and high-quality travellers,” he added in the Tourism and Creative Economy Ministry’s weekly press briefing on Monday.
Gadjah Mada University Tourism Study Centre researcher Sotya Sasongko explained the possible reasons behind the sluggish recovery, one of which was the fact that several previously international airports had their status downgraded to that of domestic airports, preventing them from accepting direct international flights.
“Closing international routes impacts the number of foreign tourists coming into the country. They will need to have many transits to access the destination,” he told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.
He also pointed to the need to stage more high-profile international events in the country, noting that international events were not as plentiful as before the pandemic, giving music or sports fans fewer reasons to visit Indonesia.
“Although there is the MotoGP event at Mandalika, it does not have that much mass appeal, so maybe the marketing strategy should be improved to be more spot-on,” he added.
Indonesia’s reputation in key target markets for international events, particularly European countries, should be maintained, he said, while there should also be efforts to attract more tourists from Asian countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, China and India by offering “flight incentives” for attending cultural events in Indonesia.
Sotya acknowledged that limiting the free tourist visa policy to just 13 countries might encourage quality tourism, but he emphasised the need to carefully measure its impacts to also maximise overall revenue from the tourist sector.
He suggested that the government bring back the previous policy of free visas for visitors from the same 169 countries.
“The visa policy should be reinstated as it was before, and then we will look at the segmentation, because Indonesia is vast and has a wide variety of tourist destinations,” he said, adding that the government needed to create more access points for tourists to enter the country.
Rajeev Menon, president of Marriott International in the Asia-Pacific excluding China, expected the Indonesian government to increase connectivity with more direct flights.
“We have no direct international flights, only domestic flights from Jakarta that do three, four flights a day.
“As we increase the number of flights, Lombok, Labuan Bajo and Belitung could become – I wouldn’t say the next Bali – but they could reach Bali-level tourism,” he told the The Jakarta Post last month.
In February, Tourism and Creative Economy Minister Sandiaga Uno admitted that Indonesia had been losing foreign tourists to neighbouring countries, blaming inconvenient visa requirements and limited connectivity between Indonesian islands.
The ministry was not immediately available when contacted by the The Jakarta Post for this story.
Indonesian Hotel and Restaurant Association secretary-general Maulana “Alan” Yusran said Indonesia’s competitiveness was still lagging behind neighbouring countries such as Thailand and Malaysia.
“In terms of foreign tourist arrivals and overall market performance, Indonesia is still losing to Thailand and Malaysia,” he said.
Furthermore, Alan noted that while hotel occupancy rates had increased over time, the revenue remained unevenly distributed, namely concentrated in popular tourist destinations such as Bali, as well as Kalimantan as a result of the development of Nusantara as the future capital.
He stressed that compliance with regulatory requirements in tourist industries should be feasible for all local business players.
As a case in point, he noted that cost for halal certification were too expensive for some players in the industry. — The Jakarta Post/ANN
