Bintan courts tourists with new facilities

A NEW airport, a new 'resort city', seaside villas, a marina for yachts, and more nightlife entertainment outlets.

Bintan island is aiming to treble the number of foreign visitors to a million people in the next four years with these new facilities, officials said yesterday.

The 300,000 international tourists who visited Bintan last year were mostly from Singapore, Korea and Japan. By 2015, Bintan expects to see one million overseas tourists as it lures some of the 17 million expected in Singapore in that year, officials say.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who was in Bintan yesterday, said the Indonesian island needs to develop its own unique identity to boost tourism.

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