More UK tourists expected to fly in

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia expects to see more tourists from Britain as state-owned Garuda Indonesia will link Batam in Riau of southern Sumatra with London next month.

Director of the Indonesia Tourist Office in London, Arifin Pasaribu, said here yesterday that Britain was one of Indonesia's major tourist markets in Europe.

Arifin who was in Jakarta to escort a number of overseas tour operators said that Indonesia's 10 major tourist markets, by rank, were Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Britain, Germany, the United States, the Netherlands and Korea.

Based on data from the Ministry of Tourism, Post and Telecommunications, 165,778 tourists from Britain visited Indonesia in 1995.

Indonesia saw last year some five million foreign tourists, about 18 percent higher than 1995's figure.

Informed sources said that Garuda, which revamped its service to Britain in 1995, planned to start the new route next month with the initial flight from London to Batam on April 2.

Currently the Indonesia-Britain route is served by British Airways, via Kuala Lumpur, and Garuda which flies via Abu Dhabi and Bangkok.

Garuda flies to Amman and Jeddah via Batam's Hang Nadim Airport in a bid to promote the island which has been developed as an industrial and tourist zone.

Batam, developed since the early 1970s as an industrial and tourist center, is located some 20 kilometers southeast of Singapore.

The Hang Nadim Airport has been developed as an international airport for both scheduled and chartered passenger and cargo flights and now has a 4,000-meter runway. (icn)