Jakarta. Coordinating Maritime Affairs Minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, Tourism Minister Arief Yahya and Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi welcomed the arrival of the cruise ship Pacific Eden at Benoa Port in Bali on Thursday (13/04).

The three ministers met with Carnival Australia president Sture Myrmell and P&O Australia director Mike Drake to discuss port fees in Indonesia. Drake said these were between 10 percent and 15 percent higher than in neighboring countries, such as Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Luhut acknowledged that high port fees, expensive fuel and water pollution have been a problem for years and promised to solve these issues with state-run owned port operator Pelabuhan Indonesia (Pelindo) III in an effort to attract more cruise ships to call on Benoa Port in future.

"We'll readjust the port fees, with Singapore as the benchmark. We'll issue regulations and adopt the national cruise tourism strategy to prevent such a problem from reoccurring in the future," Luhut said.

"We're going to build a cruise terminal at Benoa that meets international standards. That is part of the preparations for the International Monetary Fund-World Bank annual meeting in October 2018, which will be attended by between 13,000 and 18,000 people from 189 countries," he added.

Arief said the number of cruise ships calling on Indonesia has decreased from 400 to 350 last year, while the number of passengers increased from 200,000 in 2015 to 260,000 in 2016.

"That shows that those cruise ships that do call on Indonesia are larger," Arief said.

However, he added that Indonesia only received a million overseas visitors.

"We're still short on the numbers if you compare it with Malaysia, which received 8 million overseas tourists. We're going to increase the influx by 4 million," Arief said, without providing any further detail.