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THE Borobudur Temple Tourism Park proposed an additional quota for visitors to the largest Buddhist temple in the world from the previous 4,000 people per day to 10,000 people per day in anticipation of a surge in tourists on Lebaran 2021.
“We have submitted an additional visitor quota to the COVID-19 Task Force at the provincial and district levels,” said General Manager of Borobudur Temple Tourism Park I Gusti Putu Ngurah Sedana in Magelang, Sunday (18/4).
According to Sedana, the increase in visitors needs to be anticipated, not until the quota of 4,000 people per day is still lacking because the community is very enthusiastic about coming to Borobudur Temple because last year they could not come here.
“We estimate that visitors will increase in the future, because before the pandemic the holiday time was around 15,000 to 20,000 people per day. So the number of visitors was only 50 percent of the peak period before the pandemic so that it can be adjusted, because 10,000 people is also from the area of zone II,” he said.
Therefore, the Borobudur Temple Tourism Park proposes the visitor quota to be increased to 10,000/day before Lebaran, hopefully it will be approved in early May 2021.
He conveyed that the visitors would later come to Borobudur Temple because they missed it, they had not seen the temple for one year.
“At the time the government stipulated that it was prohibited to go home on May 6-17, 2021, we predicted that there would be a surge in visitors, even before the date the government had announced the ban on going home, we had anticipated it, we would coordinate with the police and the TNI regarding security in the Borobudur Temple area,” he noted.
The current quota of 4,000 visitors, he continued is sometimes not reached, sometimes not. Seeing the trend of visitors during the national holiday, which coincides with the long weekend, visitors reach 4,000, then on weekdays there is an increase to 1,500, Saturdays and Sundays are already over 2,000.
“Facing this year’s Eid holiday, our preparations are like before the pandemic. We have prepared infrastructure for visitors to pass, because this is during the pandemic period, so we emphasize that the health protocol is very strict,” he concluded. [antaranews/photo special]
