Luhut: Tourist Spending In Bali Is Lower Than Malaysia

ILLUSTRATION BETWEEN

JAKARTA - Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment, Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, said tourist spending in Bali is still lower than tourist spending in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

In fact, Bali is an area with the highest distribution of tourists both foreign and domestic.

"In 2018, tourist spending per night in Indonesia was still smaller than other countries in Asia. It can be seen from the table, that Indonesia is still below Malaysia", he said at the National Coordination Meeting for the Development of 5 Super Priority Tourism Destinations (DPSP) online, quoted by Antara, Wednesday, December 1st.

In his presentation, based on Mastercard 2018 data, tourist spending per night in Bali is around 125 US dollars, below Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which is 142 US dollars.

Meanwhile, tourist spending per night in Osaka (Japan) was 223 US dollars, Phuket (Thailand) was 247 US dollars, and Singapore 272 US dollars.

According to Luhut, the Covid-19 pandemic has caused a paradigm shift from quantity-based tourism to quality tourism.

This paradigm makes high-spending tourists take precedence over the high number of low-spending tourists.

"So we have to make a quality one", he said.

In his presentation, Luhut also said that the concentrated distribution of foreign tourists in Bali was a major problem.

Since 2015-2019, foreign tourist visits to Bali have continued to increase with a contribution of 63.4 percent to the total foreign tourist visits to Indonesia.

Even though it is dominated by foreign tourists, Luhut also said that domestic tourist visits continue to increase to Bali.