KUTA, Bali (BPN) – For the past few months, there have been worries that the situation in the Middle East and Ukraine will affect foreign travel to Bali.
However, this is denied by Guffron, Advisor to the Bali Sales and Marketing Community (BASCOMM), who said that the conflict situations did not really have an impact on Bali tourism especially for the Australian and European markets.
Guffron explained that this information was gathered during a presentation from experts of the Australian and European tourism market who were invited for a workshop held by BASCOMM on Wednesday (April 24) at The Patra Bali Hotel.
At the workshop, BASCOMM invited several experts including Kadek Suardharmana (Head of Indonesia-Supply Management, TUI Musement Indonesia), Nicoline Dolman (Contracting & Partnerships Manager, Southeast Asia, TripADeal Australia), and Claudia Schieker (Product Manager Asia, DER Touristik Deutschland ).
“These (conflicts) don’t really have much impact on the arrival of foreign tourists to Indonesia and to Bali in particular. Even the Middle Eastern market has not been affected,” Guffron explained.
Guffron who is also chair of the Alliance of Indonesia Tourism Promotion (APPI), said that there has been an increase in foreign tourist arrivals between the January – March 2024 period as compared to the same period in 2023.
Even for the Australian market, (visits to Bali) in 2023 already surpassed the visits in 2019, before the pandemic occurred.
For this reason, a commitment to maintaining the market is needed to prevent them from being grabbed by other destinations such as Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam. Guffron also underlined the importance of developing other markets such as India and South Korea.
However, the current issue is the high price of flight tickets, especially from Europe to Bali. He hopes that the number of direct flights to Bali will continue to increase, to make the price more competitive.
In addition, Guffron said that BASCOMM and its members are targeting an increase in visits to their respective properties by 2024 to reach 20 percent.
“We projected that target last year. If you look at the latest data on tourist arrivals to Bali, it is still very promising and possible,” he concluded.
