Jakarta. Indonesia announced Monday that it had welcomed over 5 million international travelers in the first five months of 2024, although this means that the country still has a long way to go before it reaches the halfway mark for the full-year target of foreign tourist arrivals.

According to the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), the number of foreign tourists in Indonesia surged to 5.2 million travelers in the January-May period. Data showed that Indonesia recorded almost 3 million foreign tourists in January-May 2020, and the number dropped to 604,471 travelers in 2021, and 997,432 tourists the following year. It then eventually grew to 4.2 million foreign tourists in the first five months of 2023.

“So we had 5.2 million foreign tourists from January to May, up by 23.78 percent compared to the same period the previous year. This is Indonesia's highest foreign tourist numbers [in the January-May period] over the past four years,” Imam Machdi, the acting principal secretary at BPS, told a press conference.

As tourism activities go into full swing following the Covid-19 pandemic, Indonesia is eyeing to attract 17 million foreign tourists throughout this year. However, BPS data showed that Indonesia had only reached around 30.6 percent of the 2024 target.

Also in May alone, around 1.1 million foreign tourists visited Indonesia. About 17.5 percent of the travelers were Malaysians, as the close neighbor made up Indonesia’s largest source of foreign tourists, followed by Australia (12 percent) and Singapore (9.7 percent). 

“We saw an 18.26 percent year-on-year increase in Malaysian tourists in May. Malaysian tourists also went up by 17.24 percent on a month-to-month basis,” Imam said.

The average foreign tourist at the time usually stayed in the country for 7.5 nights, according to BPS. 

About 544,492 foreign travelers arrived in Indonesia via Bali’s Ngurah Rai Airport -- not a surprise considering how the province is known to be the country’s top tourism hotspot. About 129,272 of them were Australians.