Gaps in Perception between Tourism Port Planners and Users

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.