Tourism Indonesia Mart and Expo opens today
JAKARTA (JP): The Tourism Indonesia Mart and Expo (TIME) is scheduled to open today, with optimism and expectations running high in the tourism industry.
The event is being organized by the Indonesia Tourism Promotion Board with expenditures of about Rp 3.6 billion (approximately US$1.5 million). Some 190 foreign buyers from 32 countries will participate in the Oct. 6 to Oct. 9 event at the Jakarta Convention Center.
The board's managing director Wuryastuti Sunario said yesterday that TIME, which is an expansion of the Tourism Indonesia Mart held last year at the same location, will involve 180 sellers from 23 provinces, which include tour operators, travel agencies, airlines, hotels, resort management firms and other tourism-related businesses.
This year's event will probably see fewer buyers, about 400, compared to 217 at the 1994 mart, when contracts worth Rp 70.7 billion were signed.
Wuryastuti, however, said that this year's TIME will help boost the tourist industry because of the many buyers from new markets such as Brunei, Czech, South Africa, Mexico, Vietnam and Greece.
"Their presence will give us a greater chance to introduce Indonesia's tourism in the coming years," she said.
Some 73 million domestic tourists are expected to travel throughout the archipelago this year, which will increase to 85 million in the year 2000.
TIME, which is scheduled to become an annual event, will be opened officially by Jakarta Governor Soerjadi Soedirdja today, featuring Minister of Tourism, Post and Telecommunications Joop Ave as keynote speaker.
Seminars
The event will also feature a conference and two seminars. The conference, to be held this morning, will invite Sue Mather, an editor at the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit, Harold Goodwin, a prominent tourism researcher and scholar, and Astrid S. Sunario, a communications expert.
Meanwhile, speakers at the seminars will include Fauzi Bowo, the head of the Jakarta Tourism Office, Halim Indrakusuma of Pacto and Jack Daniels of Bali Sea Dancer.
Two speakers from Australia and Britain, Barry Mayo and David Kevan, are also scheduled to deliver their addresses on the strategies to attract Australian and British markets.
Indonesia is developing its tourism industry to become a major foreign exchange earner by the end of the Seventh Five Year Development Plan (Repelita VII) period in 2004. The country earned $4.7 billion in revenues last year from 4,006,312 foreign tourists, indicating a 17.7 percent increase from 3.4 million visitors in 1993.
Going back to 1985, the tourism industry, with foreign exchange earnings of $525 million, ranked sixth behind oil and gas, timber, rubber, textiles and coffee. In 1993, the tourism industry ranked fourth with foreign exchange revenues of $3.35 billion. The government expects some five million to 6.5 million visitors in 1998, bringing in $8.2 to $8.9 billion in foreign exchange. (icn)