No room at the inn for weekenders, 3,000 more beds needed in Bandung
Yuli Tri Suwarni, The Jakarta Post, Bandung
Surya was confused. He had been hours looking for a hotel room nearby Bandung's Station Hall area, where the main railway station in the city is located, but his efforts had been unfruitful. All of the hotels he could find were already fully booked or occupied. It was a cool 9 p.m. on Saturday evening, and he began considering the prospect of sleeping in a mosque.
"Where else I can go?" thought Surya, a Jakartan, who had just attended a wedding party in Bandung. He blamed himself for not being prepared for his trip to Bandung. He had thought it would be easy to find hotel room in the city, which is one of the four largest in the country.
Feeling frustrated and annoyed, Surya dragged himself to yet another guest house.
He finally found refuge at the Hotel Jelita Parahiyangan, a few kilometers away from the train station, after a passing man told him there were two empty rooms.
The problem Surya faces is a common one in Bandung. The city currently faces a shortage of at least 3,000 hotel rooms to accommodate the increasing number of travelers every weekend, according to the West Java Indonesian Hotels and Restaurants Association (PHRI).
PHRI chairman H. Dermawan said there were only about 3,000 rooms available in the city, ranging from five-star hotels to modest inns, while on the weekends there could be more than 7,000 rooms sought by prospective guests.
"Frankly speaking, we are at a loss at how to respond to the increasing demand for hotel rooms at weekends -- what can we do?"
"We can't just build more hotels," Dermawan said recently on the sidelines of the West Java Travel Exchange (JTX) 2004 exhibition at Bandung City Hall.
Dermawan said investment in the hotel sector was essential. But building more hotels was uneconomic, he said, because hotels were not fully occupied for the whole week. If hotels expanded in size to address the demand for the weekend, the investment would not generate more revenue, as the buildings would be left idle on weekdays, he said.
However, Dermawan said hotel occupancy rates in Bandung were still the highest in the province.
On weekdays they were between 50 and 60 percent full. In other tourist destinations like Pangandaran beach in Ciamis, the occupancy rate was only about 17 percent, he said. The city of Sukabumi has a rate of 30 to 40 percent, while the Puncak resort area, which encompasses Bogor and Cianjur, it is about 50 percent.
Data on tourist numbers show Bandung, considered by many a shopping paradise, is still the No. 1 tourist destination in West Java province.
Almost half of both the domestic and foreign tourists visiting West Java province stop in the city.
Tourism a lucrative industry in West Java. About 35 million local and 400,000 foreign tourists have visited the province since January, bringing in Rp 17 trillion (US$1.8 billion) gross revenue into the province for the first half of this year.