Hello recovery, Bali welcomes tourists
back By Gary LaMoshi
DENPASAR, Bali - Even a vicious dry-season
rainstorm that lasted nearly 24 hours couldn't dampen
spirits among Bali tourists and the island's hospitality
industry. Nearly two years after bombs killed more than
200 people in the main resort area of Kuta Beach,
foreigners are streaming back to Bali.
Signs of
the upturn are everywhere this summer high season, and
follow a surprisingly strong Christmas-New Year holiday
period. Traffic is crawling again around the Simpang
Siur traffic circle linking Kuta to other leading
tourist destinations. More and more motorcycle co-pilots
ride wrapped in copper wire or rubber hoses, or drag
wheelbarrows or plywood sheeting behind them, key
indicators of a surging construction sector. The Yak, a
new glossy, oversized magazine, chronicles lives and
times and real-estate opportunities in too-hip Seminyak.
And most important, pale shoulders and broad
bottoms crowd local sidewalks and beachfronts. "If there
are no problems with the September [presidential runoff]
election, we could get back to where we were before the
bomb," says Mahalia Pantja, Bali business development
manager for Tour East, a local tour operator
headquartered in Singapore. With the way things are
going, Pantja's estimate may be too conservative.
Record June arrivals Bali's foreign
direct arrivals in June topped 131,000 people, just
ahead of the record for that month set in 2002.
Australian visitors led the way, taking advantage of
their winter school holidays to catch some sun. "In
April-June we had more passengers than in all of last
year," Andrea Jeremy from Australia's Qantas Holidays
reports before digging into a Balinese lunch from a
balcony seat overlooking high tide at the venerable Desa
Segara Resort on Sanur beach.
Australian and
Indonesian officials jointly opened the October 12
Australian Memorial Center at Bali's Sanglah Hospital
this month, commemorating the 88 Australian victims of
the nightclub bombings on Jalan Legian two years ago.
The Australian government contributed A$4.5 million
(US$3.3 million) to build the new burn and
intensive-care unit, and speakers from both countries
emphasized the close ties between Australia and Bali at
the ceremony. An estimated one out of every 10
Australians has visited Bali; the island is a two-hour
flight from Perth on the west coast and six hours from
Australia's east coast. Some recent Australian visitors
say they've come to Bali to help the island's tourism
industry in its time of need, but Australia's consul
general in Bali told reporters last month that he thinks
people are just looking for a cheap vacation.
Since February, though, the greeting from
Indonesian Imigrasi officers has been, "Welcome
to Bali, please pay cash." New visa rules require
Australians and holders of 20 other passports to
purchase entry visas at the airport (US$25 for 30 days,
or $10 for three days). This visa-on-arrival regime
applies to other key tourist sources including Japan,
North America and most European Union countries (some,
such as former colonial ruler the Netherlands, are not
among the lucky 21 and must get a visa from an embassy
or consulate before they land. See Visa changes darken Bali's happy holiday
recovery, January 17). And yet this added annoyance
and competitive disadvantage - beach resorts in
Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia don't require
visas for those nationalities - doesn't seem to have
slowed Bali's comeback.
Cheap seats to the
World's Best island Many signs point toward the
post-bomb boom - oops, let's say rebound - continuing.
Airline services are adding more Bali-bound seats,
including a new Singapore Airlines service from
Ahmedabad in western India and Air Asia bargain flights
from Kuala Lumpur, with return fares starting at less
than Rp500,000 (about US$56). Indonesia's national
carrier Garuda is restoring service it cut in the wake
of the bombing and the severe acute respiratory syndrome
(SARS) outbreak of early 2003.
In its
just-published annual World's Best Awards issue, Travel
& Leisure magazine named Bali the top island
destination for the third straight year, based on survey
responses from more than 425,000 T&L readers. The
magazine, affiliated with the American Express
travel-services empire, also chose Bali as Asia's top
tourist destination and ranked four Bali hotels in its
global top 100. The Four Seasons Sayan Terrace in the
highlands cultural hub of Ubud was rated the leading
resort hotel in Asia, while the beachfront behemoth Ritz
Carlton Bali Resort in Jimbaran Bay took honors as the
best hotel priced at less than $250 a night, surprising
perhaps, given the property's popularity with trendy
young Japanese. Who knew those Hello Kitty-hugging
parasito shinguru (parasite singles) where really
value hounds?
The British government delivered
further welcome news on July 6 when the Foreign Office
dropped its travel warning for Indonesia due to the
threat of terrorism. (The United Kingdom posted its
warning after the Bali bombings, closing the barn door
after 22 Britons died in the blasts.) The Foreign Office
said the change was part of a worldwide strategy to use
terrorism warnings "more sparingly", restricting them to
cases of "extreme and imminent danger" of a terror
attack based on specific intelligence reports. The
British Embassy in Jakarta, however, noted that its
assessment of the terror threat in Indonesia hasn't
changed, but that's not as important as tour organizers
now being able to get insurance on packages to Bali.
Britain before the bombs Before the
bombings, the UK generally placed fourth among overseas
arrivals to Bali behind Japan, Australia and Taiwan, but
ahead of Germany and the United States. In 2000, the
last "normal" year before the September 11 terror
attacks, more than 107,000 Britons came to Bali. Last
year, just over 50,000 turned up, according to figures
from the official Bali Tourism Authority.
Britain's move to drop its travel warning has
raised hopes that other Western countries, most notably
the United States, will roll back their travel
advisories on Bali. Fallout from the bombings goes well
beyond the heady tourist-arrival numbers, as this
excerpt from BaliDiscovery.com, a leading
clicks-and-bricks destination manager, notes:
Arrival figure[s], although impressive, do
not reveal the approximate 50% downturn in tourism
business for Bali resulting from the fundamental remix
of nationalities that comprise these totals when
compared to only a few short years ago. The downward
economic impact of the supplanting of long-haul,
long-staying and high-spending Western Europeans and
North Americans by regional visitors on brief,
low-spending visits is not reflected in the aggregate
totals for arrivals.
In the years leading up
to the Bali bombings, visitors from the Asia-Pacific
region made up about 60% of the total overseas arrivals
in Bali, according to official figures. This year,
visitors from the neighborhood comprise nearly 73% of
the total. That figure is up 4 percentage points from
2003, showing that the trend is heading toward more
visitors from nearby countries.
Changes in the
tourist makeup are a reminder that despite the dry
season, according to the calendar, and the recovery in
the tourism industry, according to raw arrival figures,
Bali still faces stormy weather before it puts the 2002
blasts firmly in its past.
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