Bali was one of the world’s most visited “cities” in 2018 according to an annual index published by MasterCard, which estimated more than 8 million international visitors came to the Island of the Gods last year (FYI in case you were confused, Bali is not a city but an island containing multiple cities, but since that distinction would probably keep Bali off this list we’ll let is slide for now).
Bali is ranked 19th on this year’s Global Destination Cities Index, which was published this week. According to the report, Bali had an estimated 8.26 million international visitors in 2018, just slightly ahead of Hong Kong, which welcomed 8.23 million international visitors last year.
The list is topped by Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, with 22.8 million international visitors, followed by Paris (19.1 million), London (19.1 million) and Dubai (15.9 million).
In the Asia Pacific region specifically, the top three destinations are Bangkok, followed by Singapore (14.7 million) and Kuala Lumpur (13.8 million). Bali is ranked 9th.
The index estimates that the average length of stay in Bali is 8.6 days, with USD 125 (IDR 1.7 million) being the average amount spent daily by international tourists.
According to MasterCard’s latest report, which is based on data from 2018, Bali’s top 3 origin markets for international overnight arrivals are China, Australia and India, accounting for 22.4%, 19.3% and 5.8% share of international arrivals respectively.
Additionally, the same report also laid out the relationship between more tourists and support for tourism jobs. Basically, it shows the combination of more tourists and high spending for each of them often translates to more support for tourism jobs.
In the case of Bali, the report estimates that 1,000 additional overnight tourists equals support for 409 jobs. It ranks the Island of the Gods with the highest number of jobs supported per tourist of any of the top 20 global destination cities on the index.
However, it should be noted that this is probably the result of lower labor costs and the fact that tourists visiting the island also tend to spend more.
According to the report, only USD 2,620 (IDR 37 million) of tourism revenue is required to support one tourism job in Bali. This puts it at a stark contrast with that of Singapore, where USD 93,062 (IDR 1.3 billion) of tourism revenue is required to support one job.
According to the report, its statistics are based on public data “… used in deriving the international overnight visitor arrivals and their cross-border spending in each of the 200 destination cities,” not on MasterCard volumes or transactional data.
Read more news and updates from Bali here.
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