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THE city of Solo (Surakarta) in Central Java has seen its share of the tourism boom currently in play in the Indonesian archipelago. As the former capital of the Mataram Kingdom that reigned over Java in the 17th and 18th century, the historical city offers an abundance of heritage sites that have become popular tourist attractions.
Foremost amongst them are the Palace of the Sultan/Sunan of Surakarta from the Pakubuwono dynasty, the minor palace (Puro) of Patih (duke) Mangkunegoro – a former rebellious prince who became the Sultan’s chief vassal – and of course Fort Vastenburg, built by the Dutch colonialists, located in the center of the city.
As busloads of tourist, foreign and domestic, descend upon the city’s numerous tourism attractions, many derive direct benefit from this traffic: hotels, restaurants, souvenir stores, tour operators and travel agents, and the many professions related to the hospitality industry. As for the local people, many who live in “kampungs” (hamlets) adjacent to or surrounding the tourism spots – most have resigned themselves to being onlookers to a tourism spectacle that has gone on for many years.
For them tourism is something that is making their neighbour – a local craftsmen – or their relative – a traditional dancer – more well-off as these relations have benefited from increasing tourism outlays. Meanwhile for the majority of kampong locals similar benefit has never existed.
This is where TRIPONYU has become a game-changer.
TRIPONYU (a play on the words “stuck-on-you”) is a booking application offering unique tours of the local communities in the Solo and Central Java area. The tours offered in this peer-to-peer internet app are unique in that they are conducted by locals who live in the neighbourhoods being displayed on TRIPONYU’s website.
It is the locals themselves who function as the guide for the tour program that they also designed with the help of the TRIPONYU staff. It is also these locals – aptly named as “Friend” (not “guide”) in this undertaking – who decide the price of the tour where the number of participants is limited to ten persons per trip.
By being able to design the whole tour package themselves, including the price for each participant, the locals who previously were bystanders or spectators of the tourism industry have now become active players. And their participation have enriched the tourism scene of Solo and the province of Central Java as a whole.
Of course the most benefit from this scheme is gained by those locals who initiated each of the tour packages as they get a whopping 93% of all sales. So if a neighbourhood tour is offered at US$ 10.00 per pax (the average price for most tours on the TRIPONYU website), with ten participants (the maximum number per tour group) the local Friend gets US$93.00 while the remaining US$7.00 goes to TRIPONYU.
The price per pax is inclusive of all expenses incurred during the tour, including meals or snacks at a local eatery serving home-made cooking, participating in traditional dance lessons with the kampong kids, or helping out the neighbourhood artisan with his/her batik painting.
The uniqueness of these community-based tours that typically lasts 5 hours is that they feature many local aspects (heritage, customs, and wisdom) usually overlooked by conventional tours. Not surprisingly, these overlooked aspects can be very interesting and even potentially be able to provide better historical overviews of many heritage spots. A more comprehensive narrative can arise showing the relationship between the glory of a certain palace (dynasty) and the commoners who sustain it.
For example, a stately residence in the kampong near Mangkunegoro palace is known to be a hiding spot for the founder of that dynasty during the time when that prince was still a fugitive from the Dutch colonialists. This story was told by the local guide who happens to be the great-grandson of the first Mangkunegoro Prince and who now lives in the house that was built many years before the palace itself was constructed. Needless to say this house has emerged as the main feature for this particular neighbourhood tour.
Finding that unique local ingredient has been the strong suit of TRIPONYU when it searches for new tour packages to offer on its website. And the range of tours offered two years after TRIPONYU was launched, is quite broad. Most take place in Solo and its surroundings (including Yogyakarta, a twohours drive from Solo) but a number of tours involve hiking into forests or up the mountains, setting sail to nearby islands, or sauntering along beaches while trying out the local cuisine available along the way.
The common factor in all these personalized tours are that the guide is a local host (Friend) who knows intimately the particulars of the location visited.
Founded by three young Indonesian developers, TRIPONYU is the first app to connect travelers in search for unique tours with hosts who are locals to the area. With the tagline “connecting people and happiness,” the idea is to bring travelers into contact with the real people who live in the many tourism areas and attractions in Indonesia but are often bypassed by this robust industry.
Thus the vision is simple; as Alfonsus Aditya, one of the founders, would say: “To engineer tourism and bring welfare to as many common local people as possible.”
To support this vision the founders of TRIPONYU and their small team have embarked on a mission to enhance the capacity of the locals by training aspiring local hosts (Friends) on how to design tour routes in their neighbourhood and improve their story-telling ability. Every weekend the team visits one of the 51 sub-districts (kelurahan) in Solo to provide these training sessions.
Topics also include safety for visitors, cleanliness of the route, culinary hygiene, and how to be gracious hosts to guests and visitors. The team sometimes also assists communities in building/maintaining public latrines as this benefits not only the occassional tour groups but also many in the community.
The team also connects these locals to the city’s tourism office so they can benefit from the various tourism development schemes the city government has for small-scale economic players like these neighbourhood tour operators. One such program is a promotion campaign aimed at the domestic market featuring the many exquisite attractions that can be found in the of the kampungs of Solo.
Another is the biannual week-long kampung festival staged in the front lawn of Fort Vastenburg with neighbourhoods from all parts of Solo participating. For this program TRIPONYU collaborates with the tourism awareness groups (Pokdarwis – Kelompok Sadar Wisata) that bring together locals who are active in promoting their community’s heritage and local wisdom as tourism attractions.
The TRIPONYU application available free on the internet have brought direct benefit and prosperity to hundreds of families in and around Solo. The tourism experience offered is not only unique but also preserves the community’s heritage, environmental landscape, and the sense of well-being that is felt by locals when they are confident of what the future will bring. [Indrasto Soejarman/Edhie Rianto]
