S'pore opens tourism office in Jakarta

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.