If you feel like Bali was crawling with Chinese tourists in August, that’s because the number of tourists from the Middle Kingdom spiked up, according to official statistics.
Nationwide, data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) shows that the amount of Chinese tourists traveling to Indonesia peaked in January, with a whopping 779,348 people, a 20.74 percent increase from the same period in 2014, reports the Jakarta Post.
In Bali alone, Chinese tourists poured in with 66,311 arrivals at Ngurah Rai International Airport. That’s compared to a reported 33,991 arrivals at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta.
And the total number of foreign tourists that visited Indonesia in August, at 850,542, exceeded the tourism ministry’s goal of 850,000.
“I hope this achievement can happen again in September,” Tourism Minister Arief Yahya said in a press release, as published by the Jakarta Post. (Of course tourism numbers here are seen as an achievement since the goal is to drive those numbers up, up, up!)
Yahya says he’s confident that foreign tourism will not be hit too hard by the global economic crisis, namely Singapore, Malaysia, China, Japan, and Australia.
“We hope in the next few months that foreign tourists visiting from those five countries and from other countries with visa-free entry will increase,” he explained.
Photo: Flickr
