How many tourists visited Flores and nearby islands in 2025?

Tourism across Flores and the surrounding islands grew in 2025 within the Labuan Bajo Flores authority’s wider coordination area, even as visitor numbers across East Nusa Tenggara fell. The area recorded 670,934 visits in 2025, up from 581,332 in 2024, while Manggarai Barat reported 500,008 visits in 2025, according to BPOLBF’s 2026 report.

What happened to tourism across Flores?

The 10-regency coordination area covering Alor, Lembata, Flores Timur, Sikka, Ende, Ngada, Nagekeo, Manggarai Timur, Manggarai and Manggarai Barat recorded 670,934 visits in 2025, compared with 581,332 in 2024, according to BPOLBF, 2026.

That represented growth of 15.4%, according to BPOLBF, 2026. The result contrasts with the wider East Nusa Tenggara total, which declined from 1,176,467 visits in 2024 to 1,134,959 in 2025, a fall of 3.5%, according to the same report.

How important is Manggarai Barat?

Manggarai Barat, home to Labuan Bajo and the western gateway to the wider Flores tourism region, recorded 500,008 visits in 2025, according to BPOLBF, 2026. The report says this followed 411,349 visits in 2024 and 423,847 in 2023.

The 2025 figure was also higher than the 391,942 visits recorded in 2021, although the report shows a sharp fall to 115,384 visits in 2022 before recovery in later years, according to BPOLBF, 2026.

Does the data count people or visits?

The official figures are reported as visits or tourist arrivals, not as a unique count of individual people. A person travelling more than once can therefore generate more than one recorded visit; the published material does not present a separate deduplicated visitor total.

BPS’s tourism statistics for East Nusa Tenggara also use visit-based indicators. For 2023, BPS reported 596,683 visits for Manggarai Barat and an average of 260,502 intra-provincial tourist visits per month, according to BPS, 2026.

What does the trend show?

The figures show that tourism performance differs within East Nusa Tenggara: the Flores-area coordination region expanded in 2025 while the province-wide total contracted. The data identify a stronger regional result, but do not by themselves establish why visitor numbers changed or how much tourism revenue reached local communities.

For readers travelling through Flores, the clearest official picture is therefore a regional one: Labuan Bajo and its surrounding regencies accounted for much of the recorded growth, while the wider province experienced a decline in total visits.

Sources

• Badan Pelaksana Otorita Labuan Bajo Flores
• Badan Pusat Statistik Provinsi