The assessment of tourism carrying capacity in Lombok Island

Abstract

Lombok Island has been established as a super-priority destination and it will be directed as a driver for other tourism destinations in Indonesia. Based on that condition, the number of tourists in Lombok Island is projected to increase significantly. As the destinations that provide natural-based experiences, Lombok Island is designed to create ecotourism and sustainable tourism development. It needs to balance between increasing the number of tourists’ arrival with the environmental capability of each destination as well as to develop tourism control and management. The tourism carrying capacity is one of the popular methods which was developed by Cifuentes in 1992. This method was used to assess the maximum capacity of 40 priority destinations in Lombok Island with 4 main calculations such as tourism carrying capacity assumption, Basic Carrying Capacity (BCC), Potential Carrying Capacity (PCC), and Real Carrying Capacity (RCC). The result of the overall tourism carrying capacity in Lombok Island is 50,523 tourists/day or 18,440,945 tourists/year. Selong Belanak Beach has the highest tourism carrying capacity of 1,452,374 tourists/year and Jeruk Manis waterfall has the lowest tourism carrying capacity of 28,705 tourists/year. It can be concluded that tourism development in Lombok Island must pay attention to the destination with limited carrying capacity which most of them are in the protected area. All the results of tourism carrying capacity can be used as input for tourism development policies for the government. Besides, the stakeholders also must consider tourism carrying capacity to create and to realize sustainable ecotourism in Lombok Island.