Unspun

The usual reasons, like those listed by respondents in the survey below – natural disasters, terrorist attacks and travel warnings – are only mostly excuses. They have an impact but Unspun’s version of why Indonesia fares so bad with tourism are:1. Lack of infrastructure. Indonesia has fantastic sights, landscapes, diving spots and culture. But try to get there and you get stuck in traffic jams, crawl along narrow and potholed roads and are assaulted by unimaginative stalls selling the same old tired tourist kitsch.

2. Lack of new blood. The tourism industry is dominated by a few players in a cozy situation. This inbred crowd is incapable of marketing Indonesia in new ways. It’s more or less the same advertising concepts and promotional activities that produce no results but assured income for the club members.

3. A Promise Everything, Do nothing national government that never gets any central planning done and has no coherent policy of tourism, which should be a major foreign exchange earner.

4. Myopic regional governments whose concept of tourism has not evolved from the good old kampung folk visiting the big town type of scale.

clipped from thejakartapost.com RI on the outs with tourists: Survey The Jakarta Post, Jakarta Indonesia fares poorly in a survey on the most popular tourist destinations in Asia, being ranked outside the top ten and way behind Thailand, Japan and China, which were named the top-three destinations. Natural disasters, terrorist attacks and travel warnings are among the reasons for people’s reluctance to visit Indonesia, the survey found. The survey was conducted by Visa International in cooperation with the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA). Of the 5,050 respondents from 10 countries — Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Sweden, Britain, the U.S and Australia — only 3 percent named Indonesia as their preferred holiday destination in Asia.