Indonesia is an adventure into a culturally fascinating and wonderfully scenic paradise. The world’s largest archipelago stretches across the equator for more than 5,000 miles and 17,000 islands along the explosively volcanic and incredibly fertile “Ring of Fire”. Tropical Rain forests saturated with vegetation and bursting with life thrive here; eternal snow-capped mountain peaks defy the senses and contrast with exotic white sand beaches idling in the laps of warm tropical seas; living forests of coral fringe equatorial shores together with a marvelous variety of marine life; orangutans and birds of Paradise share this environment with rare orchids and pre-historic dragons; awesome volcanoes demonstrate their power and strength over remarkably fertile, terraced landscapes. This is the 4th most populous county in the world with over 210 million people from a multitude of ethnic groups, customs, religions and languages.
Photo: www.wayfaring.info
The most popular tourist destinations in Indonesia are located in Java Island and the other islands nearby, such as Bali, Lombok and Nusa Tenggara. The second popular place is Sumatera island, because in Sumatera Indonesia has a border to Malaysia and Singapore, so that local tourist and foreign tourist can easily go all over Asia. The third one is Kalimantan Island which is popular with a mountain, trekking area, and orang utan. We have the most popular inbound tour operator that arranges the special tourist interest related to nature, adventure, ecotourism in Kalimantan (Borneo).
The tour operator target market in Indonesia is divided into 3 categories, the main, the second, and the new target market. The main target market of Indonesia is Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, United States of America (USA), and India. The second target market is: China, Hongkong, Russia, France, Netherlands, German, and United Kingdom (UK). The new target market is the countries in Middle East such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and so forth. This new market which is mostly Muslim countries is very potential as Indonesia 85% of the population is Muslim.
The total number of inbound tourism in 2006 is 4,871,351 tourists. Singapore is the biggest number of the inbound tourist about 1,401,804 tourists, followed by Malaysia 769,988 tourist and Japan 419,213 tourists. Based on the tourism statistic of Indonesia, we can see there the top of three foreign visitors in Indonesia, and then based on this statistic also the tour operator can shape their target market. For Singaporean, they’re usually doing business in Indonesia (Batam) and for Malaysian and Japanese Tourists; they’re usually visiting Indonesia for holidays.
Outbound tourism for Indonesian is 4.4 million in 2006. The top 5 destinations for Indonesian are Singapore, Malaysia, China, Hongkong, and Thailand. The purpose of Indonesian to visit those countries is mostly for shopping and holidays. They main gate for outbound tourism for Indonesian is Jakarta (capital city of Indonesia), Batam, and Polonia (Sumatera Island). The expenditure of them is accommodation (31.87%), Souvenir (31.04%), food and beverage (15.10%).