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Tourism: Region comes to Bali's rescue
By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE - Two months after the Bali blasts,
Southeast Asian countries are busy working on a homemade
remedy - regional travel - to make up for the slack on
tourism during what should be a much busier travel
season.
After reeling from the shock of the car
bomb attacks on a Bali nightclub on October 12, which
killed nearly 200 people, and the travel warnings by
Western governments, including Australia, the
Indonesian, Malaysian and Thai governments not been
taking matters sitting down.
Last week,
Indonesia organized a two-day tourism promotion meeting
in Bali, attended by senior officials from the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Japan
to work out ways to restore regional tourism.
There may be some encouraging signs in the fact
that a special promotion offered recently by Singapore
International Airlines (SIA) to Bali from here was
snapped up by 10,000 people in just 11 days. Planeloads
of Singaporeans have been traveling to Bali on a special
package starting at S$288 (about US$170), which includes
airfares, hotel transfers and two nights' accommodation.
Singapore Airlines says its flights to Bali are running
at almost full capacity and see this as an encouraging
sign that "tourism will, over time, return to previous
levels in Bali".
Since the October blast, Bali's
hotels have been all but deserted. Ricardo Castaneda,
general manager of Melia Bali hotel, told Singapore's
New Paper that the SIA promotion has helped to get the
hotel industry to breathe in some fresh air. After all,
his hotel's occupancy rate dropped from between 85 and
93 percent before the October blast to 14 percent in
November. The occupancy rate has now climbed to 83
percent with "majority of the guests coming to the
resort SIA passengers", he said.
A travel
consultant for Kent Holidays tour company here added
that the Bali packages are fully booked for December and
only a few are still available for January. "Many come
to us and ask for the package, but we don't have any
available," she said.
"We were planning to go to
Australia, but decided to take the Bali package with two
days' extension," explained Dallas, a young Singaporean
checking in at Singapore Airlines' counter at the
airport here. Asked about the safety factor, she
replied, "I think the security will be stricter there."
Her boyfriend Gopal added, "Every country is the same
now, even Australia is not safe any more."
It is
this factor of feeling safe in your own backyard that
the region's governments are trying to tap into by
offers like that of Singapore Airlines. Tourism, after
all, is a major dollar earner for ASEAN countries,
bringing in some US$26 billion annually.
Last
year 41 million tourists visited the 10 ASEAN countries,
including 10 million who flocked to Thailand.
Cash-strapped Indonesia is expected to lose as much as
$1 billion in the coming year after the attacks on Bali,
which as the country's top tourist destination had 1.35
million foreign visitors last year.
Many
countries have been unhappy with the haste with which
Western countries issued travel warnings to Southeast
Asia - a sentiment aired publicly by ASEAN diplomats at
the group's summit in Cambodia in November.
"This time last year, the world was recovering
from the shocks of the World Trade Center attacks,"
remarked Karim Raslan, a Malaysian lawyer, in a column
in Singapore's Straits Times newspaper a few days ago.
"An outpouring of support, both moral and economic, came
when it was needed most ... visitors came in droves to
show their support.
"But, two months after the
bombings in Bali, the silence here is almost deafening.
Where are the Bali boosters?" he asked. "No one in
London or New York has talked about rallying around a
scarred Bali, a deeply traumatized Indonesia or even a
shaken Southeast Asia."
The difference may lie
in the fact that Western governments fear that
developing and Southeast Asian countries are not able to
counter security threats as well as they do, said
Benjamin Goldsmith, a political science lecturer at the
National University of Singapore. This attitude was
reflected in threats made by Australian Prime Minister
John Howard this month to make preemptive anti-terrorism
strikes in ASEAN countries.
Last week, the
retired commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Command,
Admiral Dennis Blair, told a regional security
conference here that ASEAN and the ASEAN Regional Forum,
its forum for security dialogue, are moving too slowly
and ineffectually to counter security threats in the
region.
But rather than wait for Western
governments to declare the area safe for travelers,
Southeast Asian countries are encouraging Asians to
spend their holidays in the region, or even within their
own countries.
Indonesia is altering its
national holidays next year to move these to Mondays, so
that Indonesians can travel within their country during
these long weekends. During the six-day holiday for the
Hari Raya festival early this month, marking the end of
the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, the Indonesian
government encouraged them to visit Bali to support the
ailing tourism industry.
Meanwhile, Bali is
sending a team of 18 performing artistes and two child
painters with 50 children's paintings on a tour of Japan
starting this week. The mission aims to persuade the
Japanese - who traditionally account for the largest
number of tourists visiting Bali - to come back to the
idyllic island.
"The event will be a good
opportunity for us to show the world that the terrible
tragedy has failed to destroy us, that life in Bali goes
on," said I Gde Pitana Brahmananda, chief of the Bali
Tourism Authority.
(Inter Press
Service)
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