THE IMPLEMENTATION OF INDONESIA’S GASTRODIPLOMACY THROUGH TOURISM PROMOTION TO FRANCE DURING 2015-2018

Abstract

Indonesia is a country that is rich with various kinds of tourism products that can be used as assets by the government to promote tourism overseas. The Ministry of Tourism of Indonesia uses a variety of cultural assets in promoting tourism, one of them is by using Indonesian traditional food. Indonesian traditional foods are used by the Ministry of Tourism of Indonesia as a means of communication in the strategy of implementing public diplomacy and cultural diplomacy to promote the country to the international level. What has been working on by the Ministry of Tourism of Indonesia can be seen as an effort to implement gastrodiplomacy, in which gastrodiplomacy is one of the branches of public diplomacy that highlights the use of national culinary to be introduced and promoted to the foreign publics. France was chosen as the targeted country to implement tourism promotion because the number of French tourists coming to Indonesia has increased from 2015-2018. The involvement of national culinary in the tourism promotion which carried out by the Ministry of Tourism of Indonesia to France is done through the conduct of tourism festivals and sales mission in France and also the participation in tourism exhibitions held by the French which took place during 2015-2018. By using the descriptive-qualitative method, this research found that that the Ministry of Tourism of Indonesia, in promoting its tourism during 2015-2018, had not only implement tourism promotion but also implement gastrodiplomacy to France at the same time by involved the traditional foods of Indonesia (which dominated by Javanese foods and coffees originated from various regions in Indonesia) in its tourism promotion activities to France.