Indonesia’s First Online Travel Agent tiket.com and Tourism Ministry Release 2022 Travel Trends Report

KOMPAS.com – The tourism sector plays an important role as a source of foreign exchange after the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to revive the tourism industry and boost innovation, a lot of institutions collaborated together by doing joint research.

One of the examples was a joint research conducted by Indonesia’s first online travel agent tiket.com together with the Center for Data and Systems Information (Pusdatin) of the Tourism and Creative Industry Ministry (Kemenparekraf).

Through this collaboration, tiket.com and the ministry released the Tourism Industry Trend Research Data in a national webinar titled “New Paradigm of Indonesia Tourism Industry Trend 2023” on Tuesday, December 13, 2022.

Tourism and Creative Economy Minister Sandiaga Uno said that despite the challenges arising from the pandemic, industry players could utilize some opportunities to help recover the tourism sector in Indonesia.

During the webinar, he also expressed appreciation to all parties for their continued collaborations to revive the country’s tourism industry - one of the sectors that was hit the hardest by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Kemenparekraf and tiket.com have discussed the country’s new tourism paradigm comprising wellness tourism, work from destination, culture immersion, and off-grid travel,” said Sandiaga in a statement received by Kompas.com on Wednesday, December 14, 2022.

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Sandiaga went on to add that some new paradigms in the creative economy include Digital Acceleration, Local Before Global, Metaverse, as well as the importance of collaboration to revive the industry.

Kemenparekraf will continue to support the 3G programs: move fast, known by its Indonesian acronym (Gercep), move together (Geber), and work on every potential (Gaspol). One of the implementations of Geber was the collaboration with tiket.com.

“Let us enhance our collaborations in 2023. All targets could be achieved through continuous collaborations with tiket.com and other strategic partners to develop core programs in 2023,” Sandiaga added.

According to the joint research by tiket.com and Pusdatin Kemenparekraf, Jakarta, Surabaya and Medan were the most popular domestic destinations to travel. Outbound tourism from Indonesia showed a 81.8 percent increase in bookings and a 90.9 percent increase in passengers. Domestic flight ticket sales have also increased since 2020, indicating stable consumer behavior.

In addition, Statistics Indonesia (BPS) reported that from May 2021-May 2022, starred hotels saw a 49.85 jump in occupancy because of the increased popularity of staycation.

The trend was also reflected from tiket.com’s data, in which the villa and apartment bookings skyrocketed by 204 percent, doubling from the pre-pandemic levels. Three most favorite staycation destinations were Jakarta, West Java and East Java.

Furthermore, the average number of reservations and passengers per specific category, namely transportation (including rentals), accommodation, as well as offline and online events, showed a positive growth trend. The number of cancellations, however, showed a decline. These indicated that consumer confidence was growing.

As one of its partners, tiket.com has committed to supporting the Tourism Ministry by anticipating the industry’s shifting trends and challenges in 2023.

“In addition to launching various promotions to increase public interest in traveling, tiket.com also supports various government initiatives, especially empowerment programs for business owners and programs for researchers. Together, we are aiming for solid recovery and growth for the tourism industry,” said Gaery Undarsa, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer tiket.com.

Current trends in tourism

“Quality will be the key driving factor in making travel decisions, which is often related to mindfulness, sensation seeking, cultural immersion or booking accommodations,” Ni Wayan Giri Adnyani, the tourism ministry’s secretary, highlighted in her presentation at the webinar.

Giri Adnyani added that travelers now preferred “Local Before Global” destinations and contactless services that prioritized health and safety. These travelers were also generally more sustainably-minded.

Global trends indicate that tourism recovery has reached 65 percent compared to pre-pandemic levels. The number of global tourists from January to September 2022 has more than doubled compared to the same period in 2021.

“There needs to be focus and priority on indicators or pillars that need improvements to promote quality tourism in Indonesia,” she underlined.

Another speaker during the event was Addin Maulana, an expert researcher from the Economics, Industry, Services, and Trade Research Center at the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN). Addin talked about “Challenges and Opportunities to Improve the Quality of the Tourism Industry.”

He pointed out that the tourism sector started to grow and move toward recovery due to the increasing Covid-19 vaccine uptake in the country.

Besides, the government also issued regulations to ease tourism restrictions, which has shone a greater light on the revival of the industry during the Covid-19 pandemic. This policy has also provided a significant impact.

Addin stressed the need to help the revival of tourism by providing a well-thought-out strategy from all stakeholders, including the government, the private sector, and various industry players.

“Building initiatives and partnerships from all sectors play an important role to promote an inclusive and holistic approach. This can be done by prioritizing innovation, digitalization, and cultural modalities as the main keys to accelerating the recovery of the tourism ecosystem,” said Addin.

The collaboration between tiket.com and Kemenparekraf, he added, is a new beginning. As a government representative, the Tourism and Creative Economy Ministry can create various policies by using evidence-based policies that are not only based on official statistics but also big data provided by the tourism industry players.

“This [needs to be done] so that the government can get data on the tourism industry faster to accelerate the revival of the tourism industry,” he said.