Indonesia has allocated Rp5.5 billion for tourism and trade promotion at Harrods, a fancy shopping center in London.
"Actually the investment that we have prepared for the promotion amounted to Rp4 billion - Rp5.5 billion," marketing director general at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism Sapta Nirwandar said in Jakarta Friday.
He said that the promotion which is the first for Indonesia in which for a full month Harrods will present Indonesian specific dishes.
The promotion from April 1 to 30, 2010, would be a synergy of activities of the ministry of culture and tourism, the ministry of trade, BNI, Sarinah, and Femina magazine as co-marketing partner.
"The event is aimed at promoting and drawing investment and foreign tourists to Indonesia," he said.
The promotion activities will cover windows, batik demonstrations, posters, Indonesian specific food festival, a fashion show for a whole month, and many other activities.
Sapta hoped the event would also improve Indonesia`s image and competitiveness, especially in the market share of British and European tourists as part of Indonesia`s strategic market segment.
"Especially that London is known as a very influential international media center," he said.
The promotion efforts at Harrods will be focused on a number of leading tourist destinations, the uniqueness and wide diversity of Indonesian culture, the widely diversity of specific cookery, the furniture and handicraft industry, interior decoration, and many other creative industrial products.
Europe is the focus of 12 main markets of Indonesian tourism. He projected that the number of European tourits to Indonesia this year would reach 679,000 (from the UK, Holland, Germany, France and Russia).
With special regard to the UK, he said his side will try to attract at least 200 thousand British tourists, while their number in 2009 reached 160,036.
London is one of the five big cities in the world with more than 27 million tourists from all parts of the world each year
Friday, March 26, 2010
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Although overseas promotion of the Indonesian product is a good idea; such promotions are expensive and DepParBud officials are always on the lookout for way to embezzle the promotion money.
ReplyDeleteTherefore, overseas promotions are too often not cost effective.
A much better way to allocate promotion money is to use the funds to buy bus tickets and lunch for DepParBud bureaucrats; get them out from behind their desks and into the field ("turun ke lapangan").
It is an axiom of business that the best customer you will ever have is the one have now.
Indonesia's entire government structure has a poor understanding of what the foreign tourist wants. You can prove this by comparing how many tourists Indonesia attracts compared to nearby competitor nations such as Malaysia.
From the public statements of Jero Wacik and most other tourism officials, it is evident that they don't have a clue what the customer expects.