RI tourism seen region's most robust

RI tourism seen region's most robust

JAKARTA (JP): The Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA)
foresees that Indonesia will become the most robust tourist
destination in the region, with an average annual growth of 12.6
percent until the year 2000.

The association said in its 1996 annual report that: "The
major destinations -- Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand --
continued to maintain their top positions in the rankings in
1995, but among the bigger players, China, Indonesia and
Australia have shown the strongest overall growth in the 1990s."

China and Indonesia have now moved respectively into fourth
and fifth places in the arrivals ranking, ousting the high-cost
destinations of Japan and South Korea, whose numbers have
remained stagnant, the report said.

By 2000, the leading destinations are forecast to be China
(with 12.3 million tourist arrivals), Hong Kong (10.5 million),
Thailand (9 million), Singapore and Malaysia (8.8 million each)
and Indonesia (7.7 million).

With an estimated average annual growth of about 12.6 percent
to the year 2000, Indonesia will be followed by China (12.3
percent), Hong Kong (10.5 percent) and the Philippines (8.4
percent).

Indonesia targets to attract 7.8 million tourists in 2000.
Experts, however, predict that an optimistic projection of
tourist arrivals for 2000 would be 6.82 million, 6.55 million for
a moderate projection and 5.85 million for a pessimistic
projection.

The number of tourist arrivals in Indonesia last year grew by
some 7 percent to 4.7 million, bringing in US$52 billion in
revenue to the country. The country expects to earn between $6.57
billion and $6.94 billion from 4.78 million to 5.05 million
foreign tourists this year.

Tourism is expected to become the country's biggest foreign
exchange earner by the end of the Seventh Five-Year Development
Plan (Repelita VII) in 2004, outperforming the oil and gas
sector.

The government has predicted that the growth rate of tourist
arrivals will reach 12.23 percent in the 1995/2005 period.

According to the Pacific Asia Travel Association, origin
markets forecast to show the sharpest annual growth up to 2000
will be from South Korea (a 15.2 percent average annual
increase), Indonesia (14.2 percent), Taiwan (11.8 percent) and
the Philippines (11.1 percent), while the largest long-haul
market, the United States, will also be the fastest growing at
7.7 percent annually.

The association concluded that while overall increases in
tourist arrivals in the Asia-Pacific region will be bigger than
ever, there will be a slowdown in overall growth rates to the
year 2000.

Forecasting an average addition of 5.8 million arrivals each
year to 99 million in 2000, the report projects that two-thirds
of this total will be intra-regional travelers, expected to grow
by 7.9 percent annually, leading to some 63 million that year.

"Parallel to the economic performance of the Asia-Pacific
region in the past few years has been dynamic expansion in the
tourism sector. The speed with which this has happened has been
almost unprecedented and has become something of a byword within
the industry.

"Thus, compared with average world tourism growth of 5.1 per
annum between 1991 and 1995, the PATA region increased its
arrivals by 9.3 percent a year, to over 7.1 million over the same
period (plus 6.6 million arrivals in Hawaii, the majority of whom
are domestic travelers from the United States); and from a 10.8
percent share of world arrivals in 1991, PATA's share had
increased by 2 percentage points to 12.7 percent in 1995," the
report said.

The increases in tourist receipts have been even greater, the
report said.

According to the report, one characteristic that is emerging,
is that markets are beginning to segment. The biggest change in
travel patterns is likely to be an increase in holiday travel,
particularly in beach-based holidays resulting in a greater need
for more resort-type hotels. (icn)