In early June, a group of students of Universitas Islam Negeri Syarief Hidayatullah, Jakarta, launched an app called Nusantara Beta. Nusantara Beta is an Indonesian travel guide and tourism directory app. Today, this mobile app is available for Android and Blackberry.
Nusantara Beta (Nusantara-ku) which launched last month is the second version.The first version was launched on May last year. This winner of Bubu Award for mobile app is now the official partner of the Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy.
Nusantara Beta will recognize the location of its user, then give a suggestion of nearest tourist attractions. Nusantara Beta has more than 600 data on tourist attractions all over Indonesia which comes from their own collection combined with data from the tourism ministry.
Other than location, users can also search for a tourist spot based on province and the category. Complete data with images attract people to visit the spot. User can also use “driving direction” feature to find the route from their location to the tourist attraction.
Most interesting thing is, after reaching the attraction spot, user can search for place of worship, supermarket and restaurant closest to the area. The restaurant data is provided by Toresto.
Nusantara Beta’s newest version is also a collaboration with Good News from Indonesia (GNFI). One of Nusantara Beta’s feature displays the news from GNFI. All the features in Nusantara Beta are aimed to promote Indonesian tourism.
Surprisingly, this app is using Indonesian. So is the description on Google Play and Nusantara Beta’s website. From its tagline, “Kenali Negerimu dalam Genggamanmu – Know Your Country from Your Palm”, it seems that this app is intended for domestic tourism. I think, it will be better if this app also comes in English so it can promote Indonesian tourism abroad.
Another drawback of this app, in my opinion, is on the elusive feature, Ceritakan Indonesia. This feature contains the images from Nusantara Beta’s Tumblr which some of them are related to Indonesian tourism. Probably, this feature is intended for user generated content where user can share their experience in exploring Indonesia. Unfortunately, maybe because it is not moderated, this feature gets misused by irresponsible users.
Another drawback is that this app looks blurry. I’m not sure if it’s because the size of the image is too small or not fit with smartphone’s resolution that I use, but the app looks shaded.
With complete data and the collaboration, this app is promising. I am waiting for this app to be released in English and addition of other tourist attractions that are still so many in Indonesia. Before that, you can try the app by downloading it through its website.
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