Tourism (Continued)

Tourism was a peak industry for Indonesia from 1990 to 1996, but recent factors have caused a decrease in tourist numbers. Security issues from religious and ethnic disputes, like the Bali Others have been economic decline attributed to effects from the 1997 Asian financial crisis, natural disasters like the 2004 Tsunami, and epidemics like SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and avian influenza (bird flu). Many advocates for Indonesia keep emphasizing that most of these concerns are without merit or only effect limited outlying regions. bombings is one contributing factor.

This year, the Indonesia tourism board launched the “Visit Indonesia 2008” campaign in hopes of attracting more visitors.

The tourism department also has a blog: http://www.tourismindonesia.com/

From my reading, I’ve been learning much about the virtues of tourism and the drawbacks. Frankly, I’m not sure exactly how beneficial tourism is but I believe the answer lies somewhere between these two extremes …

South Africa’s WHITE PAPER on Tourism (Positive)



Benefits of Tourism?????




Does tourism benefit the Third World (Negative)

Seriously, you should check out these websites. It’s crazy how much of a difference there is between South Africa’s White Paper on tourism, which discusses the potential benefits for SA of adopting responsible tourism, and the brutal criticism of responsible tourism as debated by a member of the Bangkok based Tourism Investigation & Monitoring Team.