Monday, November 13, 2017
Tourism Minister Arief Yahya was among the key speakers at the National Working Meeting (Rakernas) II held on Nov 10-12 at Ciputra World, Surabaya, East Java.
Arief talked about the three types of digital revolutions: telecommunication, transportation and tourism at the meet.
“Digital technology revolution can’t be avoided; it is going to happen. It will change the world, creating new business model, so business people who don’t want to switch into digital platform will be left by the customers,” said Arief.
He explained that digital technology has changed the transportation industry by the rise of online public transportation companies such as Grab and Uber that have significantly reduced the transportation fee.
In the telecommunication industry also, the service is getting cheaper with the availability of chat applications such as WhatsApp, Google, Baidu, Line that allow users to send messages for free.
The third revolution is in the tourism industry where online travel agents likeTraveloka, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Ctrip and others have disrupted conventional travel agents.
“These online travel agents practice sharing economy and capacity optimization by selling someone else’s assets in cheaper price and gaining return from cross selling. All of these are done digitally,” Arief explained.
“If at that time we didn’t go into the cellular [industry], there would be no Telkom. We knew that Telkom customers would switch to cell phone. The same thing is happening in the tourism [industry]; 70 percent of tourists do their research online,” Arief added.
In his presentation, Arief said how the growth of foreign tourists coming to Indonesia could increase by 25 percent, making it among the top 20 worldwide list, while the average worldwide growth was at six percent.
Up to 30 sellers attended the forum ranging from tour agents, hotels to MICE organizers and management of tourist attractions in East Java.
Tags: Arief Yahya, Indonesian, Tourism Minister
