Summit to boost tourism investment: Asita

The Association of the Indonesian Tour & Travel Agencies (Asita) said tourism investment in Indonesia would grow positively after the holding of last month`s national summit.

"The investment in the tourism sector will grow positively, though it would not be as rapid as our expectation," Asita Vice Chairman for Jakarta Jongki Adiyasa said here over the weekend.

He said that significant growth could however be expected from certain tourism sectors such as hotels and MICE (meeting, incentive, conference and exhibition) programs.

The Asita chairman said he was convinced that the investment in the hotel and MICE sectors would grow significantly in line with the improvement of the country`s economic business climate.

Unluckily however, the good investment climate was unlikely to be followed by all business sectors in tourism as a whole, he said.

"The causes of this condition included the fact that there are many inconsistent polices in the tourism sector which often overlap between those issued by the central government and those by the regional administrations," the Asita chairman said.

He cited as an example the police numbers of vehicles for a tourism fleet in Bali and Jakarta. "In Bali they are required to use private plate numbers while in Jakarta they have to use service ones. Thus, in Bali, a fleet has to pay tax higher than one that has to be paid in Jakarta," he said.

Jongki said that many investors were actually waiting for the government`s consistent policies before they could go ahead with making a serious investment in Indonesia.

He considered that consistency was important because the tourism business was sensitive to policy changes. The more frequent change in the policy the bigger the loss a tourism business would likely to suffer.

Therefore, Asita was calling on policy makers to be consistent in drawing up their polices which had to be synchronized with those produced in the regions

Source: Antara