West Nusa Tenggara Province is one of the provinces which will represent Indonesia at Best Tourism Villages 2021 by UNWTO. One of the villages which will represent Indonesia at the event is Tetebatu Village, located at Sikur sub-district, East Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara. The villagers stated that they are ready to provide the best for Indonesia. Tetebatu Village will do their utmost to ensure that their community-based tourism which empowers the community to provide opportunity by safeguarding local traditions, environment, and heritage. Tetebatu Village is supported by a mentoring team that has been formed by the Tourism Office of West Nusa Tenggara to take on the role of structuring and coaching on many items which will be evaluated for the event. "Let's straighten our intentions to support our province; West Nusa Tenggara to succeed in this Tourism Villages by UNWTO competition. West Nusa Tenggara is the representative of Indonesia. There is a noble task and it is a big responsibility for us to make the nation proud in the world," said the Head of the province Tourism Office, Yusron Hadi after inaugurating the formation of the Tetebatu Tourism Village Winning Team, Monday (30/8) in Mataram. The Tetebatu Tourism Village Mentoring Team will work and support Tetebatu Village preparing all aspects assessed by UNWTO (United Nation World Tourism Organization) assessors for the best village 2021 competition. "The team will work hand in hand with the community more intensely to monitor, including reporting on the progress of improving Tetebatu Village to ensure they got all items which need to be highlighted to UNWTO assessors has the right standard or even exceed the standard as we have many value propositions on our village. Even though Tetebatu has stated that it is ready to compete, there are many aspects that need to be improved to make it perfect,” said Yusron enthusiastically. ( Resource: https://beritanasional.id )

The Governor of West Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia, Dr. H. Zulkieflimansyah, SE, MSc has established 99 tourist villages which will be focused on being developed in the next five years. In line with the above program, the Tourism Promotion Board of West Nusa Tenggara ( BPPD Nusa Tenggara Barat ) has one of the objectives to promote this initiative to the worldwide market as an initiative that needs to be supported by everyone as we do our utmost to empower our people/community to manage the tourism program with an objective of improving people welfare thru tourism. West Nusa Tenggara Province is consist of two beautiful islands : Lombok and Sumbawa; which can be reach only within 30 minutes flight from Bali to Lombok Island. We will ensure that you will have an Endless Discovery experience which will enrich your life experience. . The tourism industry on new eral will have a new face and one of them would be community-based tourism and Indonesia could lead this type of tourism as we have a huge number of villages in the rural area where they have people with their own unique culture, lifestyle and a well-reserved nature resources. Then one of our effort to list this initiative to the Tourism4SDGS platform which belongs to UNWTO so it will be an effective way to communicate to our future partner who might interest to support and collaborate to develop this community-based tourism activity in West Nusa Tenggara province. We are open to any type of collaboration to promote and to bring a lot more people to our village which has been converted as a new alternative type of tourism in the new normal era. We have a dream that tourism should bring more benefits to a larger community in the villages / rural area by highlighting their culture in a bigger perspective and nature where they live. In the end, we want sustainable tourism is implemented in a real program to support the vision and goal of SDGs 2030.

We are on the stage of place making activities to develop a new concept of Rural Community Based Tourism in Indonesia. As a starting point we have our prototype villages in Sumbawa Island and will have another villages in Lombok Island too. On this initiative we are having a concept to empower the community such as the youth to coordinate and manage the activities / experience on each villages and the women in the village to start their on small business to produce snacks, handicraft, hand weaving etc to be presented to the traveler who visiting their village. On top of that, their house will be typical accommodation for traveler and their original, authentic and tasty culinary will be offered to the visitor. we encourage people or community to take an active role toward this activity. Besides that, we try to make community understand how important it is for all of us to preserve our culture, environment, local values, way of life as well as authentic tasty culinary on each community. Most of our program is experience based activity for all our client to take part in each activity so they get first hand experience how to do something from the community then they will know and understand the local deeper on their life, culture, values , art as well as culinary. The other objective of the program besides things that we have mentioned above is to have an additional generating income activity for the community in rural area so they could improve their welfare. .