Indonesia digitizes tourism sector to win regional market

JAKARTA, Sept. 15 (Xinhua) — Indonesia started to apply digital technology in its tourism sector, aimed at better improving its resources and stakeholders in the sector and winning market in the region through an advanced telecommunications technology system.

The advanced digital system, called the Dashboard M-17, in the nation’s tourism sector was jointly inaugurated by Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs Luhut Panjaitan and Tourism Minister Arief Yahya in the latter ministry’s national coordination meeting held here on Thursday.

“We have to realize that digital technology would closely embrace people in their daily life and it would be more intense in the future. So it would be inevitable for us to carry out marketing tasks with digital technology,” Arief said.

He added that with digital technology, the marketing tasks would be cheaper and easy, has a worldwide access and paves the way for the ministry to attract more tourists in the future.

Through the application of Dashboard M-17 digital system, all works in the ministry including marketing, development of tourism industry, tour destinations and human resources in the ministry would be conducted on digital technology-based system, the tourism minister said.

Application of the digital system was essential to compete with other countries in the region – Malaysia and Thailand – in tourism sector, the minister said.

Integrated with the immigration agency, the Dashboard M-17 digital system provides real-time data on foreign tourists entering the nation through several gates.

“The real-time data would provide comprehensive information on the tourists’ country origins, ages, gender and other related necessities. Information resulted from this process would eventually be used to analyze the market based either on timeline or origin country basis,” Arief told the press conference.

Besides that, the digital system also monitors and provides information on marketing strategies applied by other countries in the tourism sector.

Indonesia now intensifies tourism and economy creative sectors, expected to highly contribute to the nation’s economy in the future amid downturn trends experienced by oil and gas, mining and palm oil sectors in the last few years.

Indonesia now develops 10 new tour destinations, dubbed as the New Bali, across the archipelago country.

The resort island of Bali was the nation’s top tour destination, favored by foreign tourists across the world.

The nation has set target to welcome 20 million foreign visitors by 2019 from over 10 million recorded in 2015. With such a target government expected the sector to earn 20 billion U.S. dollars in 2019.