Gaps in Perception between Tourism Port Planners and Users
19/10/2019 Views : 711
I NYOMAN BUDIARTHA RM.
Cruise ships tourism sector has been
defined as maritime activities with sustainable growth for over three decades.
The economic activities have brought both direct and indirect positive impacts
to the surrounding port cities or tourism destinations. The industry’s
continuous growth have stimulated more demands to develop new ports and to
accommodate the increase in ships’ volume, along with the increase of size of
modern cruise ships. The port planning stage is basically similar with other
infrastructure planning stage; those similarities include (i) determining
future requirements, (ii) developing the suitable layout for the construction
stage. However, port planning differs with other infrastructure planning in the
complexities of the planning process, layout planning, technical aspects,
environmental and legal requirements. In its infrastructure planning, port
planning must consider the complexities of hydraulic, maritime and operational
aspects. Not to mention other needs regarding transportation that is
qualitative in nature which differs in function depending on the time,
destination, frequency, etc.
Therefore, it is
important to understand the development or the improvement of new cruise ships
port can affect the environment, culture and local society. Thus, the planning
for tourism port must include an integrated approach and assessment that
include aspects such as regarding travel, tourism destinations and port
locations. There is scarce amount of research on integrated planning regarding
transportation, tourism and policy management, even though the present and
future policy making will need to be executed based on more innovative
research.
There are many
initiatives that had been encouraged by several countries including Indonesia,
however, both transportation and tourism sector – though closely related – has
not been treated as an integrated research subject. The discrepancy in port
planning in Indonesia was caused by:
1.
There are different perceptions regarding
the importance of travel motivation in tourism industry, where motivation is
just the supporting factor and not the determining factor.
2.
Until today, there are
many studies and analysis on tourism sector in Bali that have been done,
although they only focused on a certain aspect and did not encompass the whole
industry. Furthermore, the methodologies and indicators used are too simple and
not standardized (BPS and Menbudpar 2007,
Menbudpar dan BPS Bali 2007).
3.
The existing port planning methods could
not explicitly accommodate the demands from port users. The relationship
between tourism port and other sectors in Indonesia was not taken into account
and not fully understood. The current top-down approach, where there is
no interaction between the planner and users, which can be observed through the
following examples: i) the current port’s capacity could not serve the increase
of demands, ii) Overall port capacity has lagged far behind cruise tourism
growth, and iii) There is still a polemic over the expansion of ports in the
community.
4.
There is a need for a model that can
describe an integrated transportation system holistically, which can be used to
measure the performance of the entire value chain involved in order to avoid
local optimization that is not constructive to the overall system.
On
the basis of this gap, an analysis of the problem needs to be done. This
analytical concept approach is used as a reference in formulating analytical
models to address the main problems faced.