Belitung Island, before the crowd

Belitung sits in the Java Sea between Sumatra and Borneo, 45 minutes by air from Jakarta and, since 3 May 2026, under two hours direct from Singapore. It is an island of white sand and granite. Boulders the size of houses, weathered smooth over millions of years, stand along beaches that look like nowhere else in Indonesia. The water is clear, the islands offshore are close, and the beaches are quiet.

Most international travellers have still never heard of it. That is starting to change.

A destination the state has chosen

Belitung is not a speculative bet on an unknown island. Tanjung Kelayang, on the north coast, was one of the ten priority destinations in Indonesia's "10 New Balis" program, alongside Labuan Bajo, Mandalika and Lake Toba, and Belitung remains a priority destination in the national medium-term development plan. A 324-hectare tourism Special Economic Zone was inaugurated at Tanjung Kelayang in 2019.

The province has gone further. Bangka Belitung has commissioned a twenty-year tourism master plan, RIPPARPROV 2025 to 2045, prepared with the tourism planning centre at ITB, that makes tourism the backbone of the provincial economy. The Minister of Tourism visited in July 2026 and committed to overseas promotion and village tourism development. The same month, Belitung was named the national pilot region for cooperative-run village tourism, giving community tourism a legal counterparty that can contract, earn and be audited.

The economy is already responding. Accommodation and food services was the fastest-growing sector in Bangka Belitung in 2025, up 22.7 percent on the year.

And the island has shown it can host at the highest level. In September 2022 Belitung welcomed the G20 Development Working Group ministerial meeting, with delegations from 22 countries.

The whole island is a UNESCO Global Geopark

In 2021 UNESCO designated the Belitong Global Geopark, covering around 4,800 square kilometres of land and 13,000 of sea, with 24 geosites. The granite formations of Tanjung Tinggi and Tanjung Kelayang, the tin-bearing geology that shaped the island's history, and the Batu Satam tektites found nowhere else on earth give Belitung a credential that an ordinary beach destination cannot claim.

Belitung also has a story that Asia's largest travel market already knows. Around 830 AD an Arab trading ship carrying some 60,000 pieces of Tang dynasty ceramics sank off the island. The Belitung shipwreck, known in China as the Black Stone, is the largest single cargo of early ninth-century Tang ceramics ever found, and was the centrepiece of a major Shanghai Museum exhibition in 2020. For Chinese travellers, Belitung is a stop on the Maritime Silk Road. Chinese arrivals to Indonesia reached a six-year high of 1.34 million in 2025.

The access has arrived

For years the island's constraint was simply getting there. That has changed.

On 3 May 2026 Scoot opened a direct service from Singapore to Tanjung Pandan, Belitung's first international route in six years. Its roughly 11,600 seats a year are close to the island's entire foreign market in 2025, when 12,697 international visitors arrived, every one of them connecting through Jakarta. One route, flying twice a week, can double Belitung's international arrivals. Go daily, and it can triple them.

The rest of the network is growing with it. Around 32 flights a week link Jakarta. Wings Air added Palembang in August, the island's fourth direct destination. The runway at H.A.S. Hanandjoeddin International Airport was extended to 2,500 metres in 2023, and a new terminal is in design.

Demand did not wait for the flights. Foreign arrivals rose from 3,749 in 2022 to 12,697 in 2025, more than tripling with no direct international connection at all. And when the Singapore route went on sale in April, search interest in Belitung from Singapore stepped up to a new level and stayed there.

Those travellers matter more than their numbers suggest. A foreign visitor spends around eleven times what a domestic visitor spends per trip, and stays about half as long again.

An island made for the second and third night

Island hopping is Belitung's signature. Boats leave Tanjung Kelayang for Batu Berlayar, the tidal sandbars, and Lengkuas Island with its Dutch-era lighthouse and some of the best snorkelling in the Java Sea. Surfers have uncrowded breaks at Pantai Matras, Tanjung Kelayang and Penyusuk, with surf schools and board hire on the beach. Golfers have Black Rocks, an 18-hole championship course at Tanjung Tinggi designed by Ron Fream and opened in 2019.

The food is its own reason to stay. Gangan, the island's signature fish soup, is built on fresh snapper, turmeric and galangal. Mie Belitung layers sweet shrimp broth and peanut sauce over noodles. In the east, the town of Manggar calls itself the city of 1,001 coffee shops, many open around the clock, with their own ordering vocabulary and a monument to the culture unveiled in 2025.

There is plenty here to fill a long weekend and more. What the island has lacked is the product to keep visitors for it: today the average stay is about a night and a half.

Capital is following

Experienced operators are now building ahead of the curve. A private-villa resort on the island is already achieving nightly rates above US$300. An established boutique resort group broke ground on its third private-island property off Belitung's west coast in June 2026. A 35,000 square metre hotel and villa resort has topped out at Tanjung Binga. The island's five-star incumbent is reinvesting too, adding a wellness centre, racquet sports and sunset cruises.

When operators who underwrite island markets for a living commit capital before the airport terminal is built, they are telling you where they think the island is going.

Supply at the top of the market is still thin. There is one five-star hotel on the whole island, and there is no beach club anywhere on Belitung. For a well-designed, well-run product, that is the opening.

Where Numada sits: Kathera Amani Belitung

Kathera Amani Belitung is Numada's first property development as a company, a joint venture with PT Kathera Amani Indonesia. Kathera Amani is an Indonesian hospitality brand built around high-quality short-stay villa resorts. Its principals travelled Indonesia's coastline for years in the construction supply business, identified Belitung as the opportunity, found the land and negotiated its purchase themselves.

The resort sits on a private stretch of white sand on the north coast, 1.45 hectares with 64 metres of beach frontage. The masterplan brings together 30 private pool villas in one and two-bedroom layouts, a restaurant, a wellness centre, a conference hall of three adaptable rooms, and the first beach club in Belitung, open to the public as well as to guests. Kathera Amani's own boats will take guests island hopping. Black Rocks is five minutes away, Tanjung Pandan 35 and the airport 45.

It is built for exactly the gap the market shows: a reason to stay the second and third night. Phase one delivers 20 villas and the beach club. Phase two adds ten more villas, funded from operations. The villas, conference centre and gym use modular steel-frame construction, with walls, floors and roofs prefabricated in Java and assembled on site, which shortens the build, cuts waste and holds quality. Opening is planned 15 months from financial close.

Numada's part is the work that turns a good site into an investable one. We co-sponsor the project and we built the financial model and the investment structure. We ran the market research behind this article, from the air-seat arithmetic to a dedicated study of the China market. We surveyed and mapped the site, confirming it sits almost entirely within the island's designated tourism zone and outside the forest estate. And we are leading the search for the investment partner who will join us, bringing the same discipline we apply as coordinating agent for sales at Mandarin Oriental, Bali. Contact us for Investment Information

Belitung will not stay undiscovered for long. The flights are here, the state is committed and the capital is moving. We would rather be on the beach before the crowd than after it.

To discuss Kathera Amani Belitung, visit katheraamani.com or contact the Numada team.

Sources: BPS Kepulauan Bangka Belitung; Dinas Pariwisata Kabupaten Belitung; Kemenpar; UNESCO; Xinhua; Scoot and Lion Air Group route announcements; Numada research, 2026.