Image: Wonderful Indonesia. Credit: www.kemenpar.go.id
Foreign tourist arrivals to Indonesia in May this year increased 4.55 percent from May 2017, with 1.2 million people arriving to the archipelago. Meanwhile, visitor numbers from January to May 2018 reached 6.17 million, which was an increase of 11.98 percent on the same period in 2017. These stats were published by Statistics Center Institution (BPS) in Jakarta on Monday.
Tourism Minister, Arief Yahya, said that he was happy with these numbers. “We have targeted 17 million visitors this year, or an increase of 17.64 percent over 2017, with 14.04 million visits,” he said. To achieve it, his department has worked with tourism stakeholders and airlines to carry out three strategic programs. They are 2018 ViWI (Visit Wonderful Indonesia) Hot Deals, incentive gifts to the airlines, and their digital marketing platform Competing Destination Model (CDM).
Arief said the average of the foreign tourist arrivals during the first five months was 1.23 million. This means they need at least 1.4 million visits per month for the rest of 2018 to achieve the target.
“If we didn’t do anything, we would only get 14.76 million visits. That’s why we launched those three strategic programs. We hope we can get an extra 5 million visitors so the target will be fulfilled,” he said to balipost.com.
Arief also explained that the incentive gifts to the airlines will be given in the form of ticket bundling and a program called More or Less (you get more, you pay less). The target of these programs is 1.5 million extra visitors. Meanwhile, the ViWI Hot Deals program, which will be carried out by 18 tourism stakeholders, will apply an economy sharing concept, with the target of 2.5 million visits. And for the CDM platform, the target would be one million more visitors.
