Since last October 14 the island of Bali, the main Indonesian tourist resort, has started again to admit international tourists from 19 countries after a year and a half long border closure due to the coronavirus pandemic. For now the results have not been encouraging, and getting to the island is very complicated, but according to local authorities and hoteliers in the area there are timid signs of optimism for the near future, also thanks to domestic tourism.
According to the Bali Central Bureau of Statistics, quoted by CNN, international tourists who visited Bali in 2021 were 45: an amount that cannot even compare to the 6.2 million foreigners who arrived in 2019, or the million who visited the island in early 2020, before the introduction of travel bans. In the first month following the reopening of the borders, they arrived in Bali alone two foreign visitors: about 500 thousand arrived in the same period of 2019.
Nyoman Gede Gunadika, Head of Tourism of the local province, told a CNN that this is the lowest number of foreign visitors ever recorded in Bali, which is located east of the island of Java and has about 4.2 million inhabitants.
Bali is mainly visited by tourists from Singapore, the Philippines, Australia and Thailand, but also many visitors from Western countries. Despite the reopening of the borders, reaching it in this period is a little more complicated than usual: among other things, foreign tourists must have completed the vaccination cycle against the coronavirus and carried out various molecular swabs (PCR); in addition, they must apply for a special visa, have international travel insurance and undergo a quarantine period after arrival. For comparison, major tourist resorts in countries such as Thailand and Vietnam allow entry to foreign travelers who have completed their vaccination course without the need for quarantines.
One of the other restrictions imposed on tourists from the 19 countries admitted to Bali, including India, China and Japan, concerns the journey to get there: under the new rules, foreign visitors can arrive in Bali only with direct flights from their own countries, flights which, however, in most cases are not carried out. For the moment, however, no international flights have been resumed at Bali airport and the only ones in service are domestic ones, which mostly depart from the capital Jakarta, on the island of Java. As he noted CNN, many of the foreign tourists who visited Bali this year did so by arriving on their own private yachts.
With over 270 million inhabitants, Indonesia is the fourth most populous state in the world and last summer was particularly affected by a new, serious wave of the pandemic. At the moment, more than 140 thousand deaths from causes related to COVID-19 have been ascertained throughout the country (in Italy there are over 135 thousand) and the vaccination campaign is taking place very slowly, with the result that currently only about 40 percent of the population is fully vaccinated.
As for the effects of the pandemic on tourism, understandably, in Bali they felt more than elsewhere: how he remarked Bloomberg, the island’s economy in 2020 contracted by 9.3 percent compared to the previous year, achieving the worst result of all the country’s provinces.
Although the process to get there is now quite complicated, the holiday season at the end of the year is a good time to understand if the restrictions imposed on Bali to contain the coronavirus pandemic will be able to limit the spread of infections and the emergence of new outbreaks. . It is also an opportunity to try to catch some small signs of recovery, mainly related to domestic tourism, that is, that of Indonesians who visit the tourist resorts of the country.
Ray Suryawijaya, head of the Badung Regency Hotel and Restaurant Association in the south of the island, told CNN that «with all these obstacles» it is difficult to expect to see soon all the international tourists who were there until a couple of years ago. Either way, hotel bookings are doing a little better than a few months ago. To give the idea, according to the analysis of a research institute cited by Bloomberg, 57 percent fewer bookings were recorded in the week from 29 November to 5 December compared to the same period in 2019: a relatively better figure than last August, when bookings were 80 percent lower than in August two years ago.
One of the main events on which the local administration is focusing a lot for the revival of the economy is also the next G20, the summit between the leaders of the main developed countries, expected in Bali for October 2022.
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