Bali Tourism Numbers
The Indonesian Bureau of Statistics has recorded a significant increase in the number of foreign tourists for the month of April, up 25.4% for the month, the majority was by air with a small portion attributed to cruise ship arrivals.
The first four months of 2017 has seen an increase in tourist numbers to the same period in 2016 of 24% and the total number of tourists surpassing 1.8 million. Assuming these numbers remain consistent for the rest of the year Bali should break the 6 million mark for total tourist arrivals.
Tourist numbers from the Chinese mainland continue to grow with more than 500,000 tourists from January to April this year reflecting more than 28% of total foreign arrivals. Over the past few years there has been a 60% increase in tourist numbers from China year on year.
Even though Chinese are seen now as the largest contributor to foreign arrivals they tend to be low budget travelers holidaying in tour groups and staying in budget hotels for very short periods of time whilst not making a significant contribution in terms of real spending. Bali needs to consider the real value of this increase and look at the cause and effects of over population of low cost tour groups, the effects this has on the economy and more over negative impacts on what is already a relatively fragile and under developed infrastructure.
Australia is still a strong contributor to the sector reflecting 20% of total tourist numbers thus far for 2017 and has seen a 5% increase overall compared to the same time in 2016. Japan remains a consistent contributor also, however Japanese tourist arrival numbers dropped by almost 3% compared to arrival numbers in 2016. India is seeing significant increases in numbers with a whopping 30% increase. English tourists are closely placed behind India with a 10% increase compared to the same time last year.
Hotel occupancy numbers for March and April were around 57% with hotels in the Badung Regency on top at around 61% while the average length of stay was alarmingly low at around 3 days only on average.
With the length of stay put at 3.9 days in the recent past now down to 2.89 days, the steady rise of 25.4% increase in tourist arrivals becomes of little or no consequence to Bali’s sorely overbuilt hotel industry as the result of the 25.9% decrease in length-of-stay at hotels.