Legislator says expensive domestic tickets drive tourists to big cities

A member of Indonesia’s House of Representatives Commission VII, Putra Nababan, has assessed that the high price of domestic flight tickets is making foreign tourists reluctant to transit to remote regions and more inclined to stay in large cities. As a result, he said in Jakarta on Thursday, the circulation of money is only enjoyed by international hotel chains and shopping malls. He argued that the tourism sector must side with the grassroots economy, not large corporations. “Ordinary people are forced to be spectators amid the accumulation of capital by big corporations,” he stated. He also highlighted the anomaly of high tourism investment figures reaching IDR 25.34 trillion, or a growth of 76.67 percent, which is not directly proportional to the stagnant absorption of labour. “This proves that our tourism investment is currently capital-intensive and concentrated in large corporations,” he said. The Ministry of Tourism, he noted, is currently trapped in relying on long-haul flight route markets. Once the geopolitical crisis hits Middle Eastern airspace, he said, local tourism immediately wobbles with the cancellation of 1,444 flights, eliminating the potential of 160,052 foreign tourists. He assessed that the reactive-substitutive policy of shifting the market to regional ones due to these problems does not solve the root cause of market dependency. On the other hand, according to him, the growth figure for the accommodation and culinary sector of 13.14 percent is also exclusive in nature because it is only enjoyed by the formal sector receiving fiscal incentives. Meanwhile, the informal sector such as local food stalls and self-managed homestays are actually marginalised by inflation in raw food materials and energy. Investigative data provides an example: the Jakarta-Bali route for one-way economy class in early 2026, during a government discount programme, was only around IDR 800,000 to IDR 1.1 million. However, by the end of May 2026 it had risen to IDR 1.4 million to IDR 2.3 million. In fact, on some busy dates in April-May 2026 it reached IDR 1.8 million to over IDR 2 million one way. Thus, on a number of popular routes, the current economic fare can be 20 to 50 percent higher compared to the government discount period, and on certain days it can approach double the promotional fare from early 2026.