JOURNAL CITATION

Ghenoveva Chesaria – 130218080 – KP A

Boosting Indonesia’s Tourism Sector to be Competitive

With more than 17000 islands, more than 300 ethnic groups, more than 700 languages, heritage sites, and the third largest biodiversity, Indonesia has many tourism destination such as Borobudur Temple, Mount Bromo, Lake Toba, Raja Ampat, Labuan Bajo, etc so that maximizing Indonesia’s tourism is one way that government can do to direct and indirectly reduce the current account deficit. By coming to one of the Indonesia’s tourism cite, it will increase capital flows directly to Indonesia. On the other hand, maximizing tourism will absorb a lot of labor so it will has an impact on increasing economic growth or in the other words, it will indirectly reduce current account deficit.

Many ways have been done by the government to increase the visitors to Indonesia’s tourism such as exempting visa for 169 countries, Wonderful Indonesia program, developing transportation and infrasturcture so that tourism destinations are accessible. Although many ways have been done by the government to increasing visitors, the target still difficult to achieved because there is still lack of promotions and lack of focus in developing tourist destinations. One of government’s program to increasing Indonesia’s tourism visitors called Wonderful Indonesia was not optimal too which the number of visitors who came only 12.948.000 people with approximately total revenue is $12.530.8 million or an average revenue per visit is $967.8 in 2019.

Actually, compared to the other ASEAN countries, Indonesia’s tourism cite is more competitive in terms of price and attractiveness but the problem is the limited budget for promotions. With the data from World Economic Forum in 2019, Indonesia is only in the 4th place with a score of 4.3 for 2019 Tourism Competitiveness Ranking in ASEAN. The first to the third place are held by Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand with the score of 4.8; 4.5; and 4.5.

Indonesia’s tourism is actually very rich but still can’t attract tourist to stay longer in Indonesia. By the data from Indonesian Statistic shows that the average length of international and domestic tourists to stay at classification hotel in July 2019 is only 1.8 days. The reasons why domestic and international tourists won’t stay longer because the true beauty of Indonesia’s tourism isn’t followed by service offerings from the creative industry sub-sector such as crafts, fine arts, and culinary. By improving the service offerings from the creative industry, it is believed that it can affect tourists to stay longer in Indonesia’s toursim cite. Banyuwangi Regency is a real example of that believes. Banyuwangi Regency has executing 99 festivals with a target to make tourists stay at least 2.8 days and spend Rp 2.7 million per day per person for international tourists and Rp 1.5 million per day per person for domestics. Blue Fire phenomenon in the carter of Mount Ijen is still the pledge tourism of Banyuwangi Regency until now. By relying on it’s attractiveness, many areas around Mount Ijen transformed into tourists attraction too. The Taman Suruh Village Agro Tourism Park at the foot of Mount Ijen covering 8 hectares is one of the tourists attraction around Mount Ijen. This place held a festival called Agro Expo Festival and managed to bring 1000 tourists a day.

In this era, people’s consumption patterns have shifted from ownership of goods to travel and adventure. This shifted patterns means holidays is now a necessity for our lifestyles. Internet has become a part of our life which means it’s also affect our lifestyles. Nowdays, people always post their experience while traveling in social media or tourism application like tripadvisor where we can write our testimonies about that tourism cite. By posting our holiday experiences in social media or tripadvisor, it will be an indirect promotion about that tourism cite so that a tourist destinations can be more widely known and will also form a community based tourism.

Having a community-based tourism will have a long-term impact in our economy such as increasing income, surpressing urbanization, and reducing unemployment. The example for this statement is in the Special Region of Yogyakarta. Pentingsari Hamlet, Umbulharjo Village, Cangkringan District, Sleman Regency with its concept of village authenticity and Bejiharjo Village, Karangmojo District, Gunung Kidul Regency with its Pindul Cave is the examples of villages in Special Region of Yogyakarta that develop tourism. At a minimum, the villagers are able to earn an additional income between Rp 1 million to Rp 2 million per month and the visitors could be more than 1000 peoples per month. In 2018, this village was able to earn Rp 200 million per month.

Currently Bali is the number one tourists destination when they go to Indonesia. With the presence of Bali, Indonesia should increase the attractiveness of another tourism cite so that its cite can attract tourists too. If another Indonesia’s tourism cite is attractive for tourists, they will spend more time and money in Indonesia. The government itself is now prioritizing 10 main tourism destination in Indonesia, such as Lake Toba in North Sumatera Province, Labuan Bajo in East Nusa Tenggara Province, Likupang in North Sulawesi Province, Borobudur in Central Java Province, Mandalika in West Nusa Tenggara Province, etc. Another tourism cite that Indonesia has is a sailing tourism line with 3000 nautical lines and doesn’t get typhoons.

Tourism market is formed from demand and supply. Based from that research, domestic tourists expect tranquilize, safeness, friendliness, availability of playground especially when they bring their children while international tourists expect destinations that have good prestige and privacy. Both, for domestic and foreign tourists price is not a major problem because as long as the experiences is worth by the price they will be fine. According to Crouch and Ritchie (1999), that are many factors that affect demand and supply in tourism market that are ignored by the stakeholders such as toilet cleanliness, the discrimination of ticket price for domestic and foreign tourists, the price of flight ticket, and the souvenir price.

In this research, they use Y=x1+x2+x3+.... formula which Y is a dependent variable and x1,x2,x3,... is an independent variable. Y means tourism demand and x1,x2,x3,... means factors that affect tourism demand like price, income, security, convenience, promotion, hospitality, playground, and travel agenda.