None Of The Foreign Tourists Visited Bintan During The COVID-19 Pandemic

JAKARTA - Head of the Bintan Regency Tourism Office, Riau Islands Province (Kepri), Wan Rudi, said that the visit of foreign tourists (tourists) to Bintan during April-July 2020 had zero or no impact from the COVID-19 pandemic.

This condition is also influenced by the issuance of Permenkumham number 11 of 2020 concerning the prohibition of foreigners from entering or transiting to Indonesia which took effect in early April 2020.

"Until now, foreign tourists have not been able to visit Bintan because the entrance door is still locked by immigration, even though foreign tourists have a very large economic impact on Bintan tourism," said Wan Rudi as quoted by Antara, Thursday, September 3.

So far, he said, the Bintan tourism market has been heavily dependent on visits by foreign tourists and expatriates from neighboring Singapore. Not only that, Singapore, through Changi Airport, is also an entry point for the arrival of foreign tourists from various countries to Bintan, such as China, Taiwan and Korea.

"Apart from Indonesia, Singapore also limits the arrival of foreign tourists, as a result foreign tourists visiting Bintan is also affected," he said.

Furthermore, Wan Rudi, argued, the low level of foreign tourist visits to Bintan made many tourism actors complain that they did not have income, such as the hotel industry and travel agents.

Not a few of them have been forced to lay off and lay off their employees due to this pandemic.

"We need to encourage friends who do tourism to survive in order to exist. In the meantime, it is recommended to just hook the local market first with attractive promotions so that it can continue, and hopefully there will be no more employee layoffs," he said.

Wan Rudi also hopes that there will be an MoU between Indonesia and Singapore regarding the recovery of tourism, so that border tourism in the Riau Islands Province can recover soon. This is because the tourism sector is very dominant in the economy in this area, such as hotels, transportation, restaurants, fisheries employees, and food supply.

Meanwhile, from the data from the Riau Islands Province BPS during 2019, the number of foreign tourists visiting Bintan reached 700 thousand people. Bintan is the second largest foreign tourist visit in the Riau Islands Province after Batam City.

Meanwhile, the Riau Islands Province is in the second position of the highest number of foreign tourists visiting in Indonesia after Bali, with 2.5 million visits during 2019.