S'pore opens tourism office in Jakarta

Leony Aurora, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Singapore has opened its first tourism office in Indonesia as part of efforts to encourage more Indonesians to visit the island state.

"We're already each other's most important tourism source, but we see enormous potential to increase this further," Singapore's Minister of Industry and Trade George Yeo told reporters on Monday after the opening ceremony of the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) office at Bank Danamon Tower in Central Jakarta.

Another STB office will be opened in Medan in March.

More than one million Indonesian tourists have visited Singapore annually since 1997. Last year, in the midst of the SARS epidemic, the number of visitors from Indonesia reached 1,341,174, only 3 percent lower than 2002. They accounted for 22 percent of the total number of tourists visiting Singapore.

Likewise, in 2002, about 1.3 million of Singaporeans visited Indonesia.

"With the new STB offices, we wish to give Indonesians more reasons to visit Singapore," said Chan Tat Hon, assistant chief executive of STB worldwide, "not only for shopping and traveling, but also for education and health services".

Another mission of the STB offices is to promote Indonesia and Singapore as a joint destination, said Yeo.

"The typical package now is Singapore-Malaysia-Thailand," he said.

STB's overseas offices would make and promote packages of joint visits to Singapore and Indonesia, particularly Bali, Yeo added.

Indonesia's State Minister for Culture and Tourism I Gde Ardika, who also attended the opening ceremony, welcomed this idea.

"We will use the facility offered by the Singapore Tourism Board and its offices overseas," he said, adding that this could result in savings since Indonesia would not need to build offices abroad.

"We will support STB here and it will support us by promoting us abroad," he said.

The government has set a target of five million visitors this year, although last year's arrivals, according to the latest report from the Central Statistics Agency, reached only 3.69 million.