Officials in Bali’s Badung regency are stepping up their efforts to tackle the increasing number of incidents involving misbehaving tourists on the island, announcing yesterday that a special task force would be formed to monitor foreign visitors to Bali.
“This must be something we attend to, the quality of tourists. We have to take responsibility together to maintain Bali as an attractive tourist destination,” Nyoman Badra, who heads Badung’s tourism agency, told Kompas yesterday.
Badra’s concerns are not unfounded. In the past week alone, there were two reported cases of misbehaving tourists, one involving an Australian national who was briefly detained after he allegedly caused a scene in Seminyak while intoxicated, and another involving a British woman who was handed over to immigration after she allegedly threw pebbles at vehicles passing by on a street in Kuta.
Badra fears that more misbehaving tourists will ruin Bali’s image and said he is working on creating a special task force to monitor foreigners holidaying on the island.
“Badung regency will form a team that is separate from immigration’s team that works to monitor foreigners. Our team will consist of officials from the judiciary, police and Satpol PP (public order police), and we have begun discussing this with them,” Badra said.
He explained that the team will mainly monitor Badung regency to ensure quick responses should disturbing situations arise.
I Gusti Agung Ketut Suryanegara, who heads Badung regency’s Satpol PP, said last week that the number of misbehaving tourists has been increasing over the years. In his first year, back in 2017, he said there was only a handful of such cases.
“In 2018, it increased to one to two people every month, [but] in 2019, there has been incidents on a weekly basis involving one or two people exhibiting disturbing behavior, going berserk or disrupting public order,” Suryanegara said.
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