Indonesia plans to welcome 14.3 m tourists in 2024
Travel Biz News —
The Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy of Indonesia plans to provide incentives to boost international tourist arrivals to the 2024 target of 14.3 million.
“We are currently exploring the strategy. Back then, we provided incentive per person but it must be approved by the Ministry of Finance first,” the ministry’s director of tourism marketing for Asia-Pacific, Raden Wisnu Sindhutrisno, said at a seminar in Tokyo on Tuesday.
He informed that previously, the incentives were in the form of cuts in plane ticket prices, such as discounts and cashback.
The effort is needed because other ASEAN countries, such as Thailand and Singapore, are promoting their tourism more intensively with significantly large budgets.
“We already have the capital with the awards that our destinations received…we have everything, nature, culture, for that reason, we are inviting them (tourists) and promoting (Indonesia’s tourism),” he said.
The effort is also considered necessary as airline passenger seat occupancy has not reached 100 percent.
For instance, he noted that in 2023, there were 13 China-Indonesia flights per day with a total of 1.2 million seats a year and unoccupied seats pegged at 15–40 percent, meaning the number of passengers was only around 700 thousand out of the maximum capacity.
“If we want to achieve 14 million foreign tourist arrivals this year, we must ready 22 million seats,” he said.
Tourist arrivals in 2023
Meanwhile, Statistics Indonesia (BPS) recorded that cumulatively, the number of foreign tourist arrivals in Indonesia during the period from January to December 2023 had reached 11.68 million, thereby indicating an increase of 98.30 percent from 2022.
“It rose 98.30 percent as compared to the same period in 2022,” Acting Head of BPS Amalia A. Widyasanti stated while delivering the Official Statistics News in Jakarta recently.
The figure surpassed the total number of foreign tourist arrivals in 2022 that only reached 5.89 million.
Southeast Asian countries are still dominating in the top 10 countries visited by Indonesian tourists.
Malaysia is the main destination for Indonesian tourists traveling abroad, with a share of 27.98 percent, which showed an increase as compared to the previous year.
After Malaysia, the other nine countries are Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Thailand, Japan, China, Australia, and South Korea.
Saudi Arabia has the second-biggest share after Malaysia, with 17.41 percent, followed by Singapore, with 17 percent.
The average length of stay of Indonesian tourists in 2023 was 15.05 days per trip. – (Inputs from Antara )
27 March 2024
Photo : Foreign tourists in Sanur Beach, Bali. ANTARA/Ni Luh Rhismawati.
