Tourism Officials See Red Over Scrapping of 7-Day Visas

Jakarta Globe, January 27, 2010

Visitors getting a Visa on Arrival will have to pay for a 30-day stay. (Antara Photo)

Two government departments look set for a clash of ideas over the scrapping on Tuesday of seven-day visas on arrival for foreigners arriving in Indonesia.

Scrapping the $10 visas and leaving only the $25 visas, which is valid for 30 days, will encourage foreign tourists to stay longer as well as curb graft among immigration officials, Maroloan Barimbing, the spokesman for the Directorate General of Immigration under the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, said on Wednesday.

Maroloan said visitors must now buy the 30-day visa regardless of how long they plan to stay. As a bonus, they will now be able to extend the visa by another 30 days without leaving the country, immigration officials have said.

But scrapping the seven-day option has proved immediately controversial, with the Culture and Tourism Ministry taking the unusual step of publicly denouncing it as likely to actually reduce tourist arrivals.

“I am worried the regulation would affect foreign tourists who make frequent short stays,” Firmansyah Hakim, the ministry’s director general of tourism destination development, told the Jakarta Globe Wednesday.

He said his ministry was currently reviewing the potential impact on tourist numbers. “We are going to ask the immigration department to sit down with us and hopefully we can come up with a solution,” he said.

Industry experts have said the global economic crisis has shifted many tourists from long stays to shorter visits. In 2009, tourists stayed an average of 8.58 days, continuing a trend toward shorter stays since 2000, the Tourism Ministry reported. The low figure demonstrates that a significant number of visitors — especially those arriving by land from Malaysia and Singapore at Batam in Riau Islands province — come for stays of less than seven days and will now have to pay extra.

“Visitors from immediate border countries will likely think twice before going for a short trip in our country,” Firmansyah said.

Maroloan defended the move, saying visitors planning only short stays would be tempted to stay for longer as they would automatically have a 30-day visa.

“We hope this policy will extend tourists’ stays in Indonesia, giving them a chance to visit more places in the country,” he said.

“The policy will also simplify the supervision of overstaying foreign tourists because there is only one visa option.”

He said the decision was also meant to combat corruption. Last year, the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) caught the ministry off guard by revealing it had found more than Rp 3 billion ($321,000) in unreported fees for visas on arrival collected over a six-month period at Ngurah Rai International Airport in Denpasar, Bali.

The ministry discovered that officials had been defrauding travelers by issuing $10 visas to those who paid $25 and pocketing the difference. Maroloan said officers in charge were punished by having their pay rises frozen.

The ministry conducted a similar inspection at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta but the spokesman said no irregularities were found.

The immigration department was listed as one of the country's most corrupt public institutions in a 2009 bribery index survey released by Transparency International Indonesia.