The Tourism Competitiveness of Districts and Cities Possesing a National Park in Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesia has comparative advantages of tropical ecosystem, wealth tourist attraction nature, the diversity of culture, living culture peculiar and demographic dividend to participate in tourism. The comparative advantages in accordance with this tourist’s behavior in the experience economy era where the tourists are seeking a tourist destination that has an authentic, such as a diversity of culture and the natural environment that is distinctive. However, this comparative advantage does not correlate with the trend of the increasing number of tourist arrivals in Indonesia. It shows that there were problems in a tourism competitive advantages and knowledge related to competitiveness of tourism inadequacy. This motivates to the need for a study in measuring the effectiveness of competitiveness tourism-based ecotourism in the tourist destinations in Indonesia. This study evaluates the competitiveness of tourism in the areas which have a national park in Indonesia on providing guidelines for tourism policy makers in Indonesia. We use travel and tourism competitiveness index by using data which has been available in the government and non-government institutions. We further employ clusters and dimensional scale to analyze the data. The results found that the average score of competitiveness of tourism indicates the index of 3 – 4. In summary, the tourism competitiveness in the area which have a varies national park can be classified into 5 clusters of tourist attractions based on characteristics of tourism competitiveness. They are health and hygiene, environment indicator, price competitiveness and purchase power parity.