There’s going to be a mad rush of Chinese tourists coming in to Bali to celebrate Imlek, Chinese New Year next month.
At least 15,000 Chinese will be coming to the Indonesian island to ring in the Year of the Dog, which under the lunar calendar, falls on Friday, Feb. 18.
This whopping figure of incoming Chinese comes from three of the biggest booking agents in the Bali market who have secured reservations with Chinese holiday-makers. Tjendana Mandala Sakti (TMS) has confirmed 6,000 Chinese (with thousands more bookings in process) ProBali Pandus Wisata has another 5,000 confirmed, and Jetwing has 4,000 people booked up, according to Kompas.
“Since last year, February had thousands making a special visit of Imlek, totaling about 100,000,” said Vinsensius Jemadu, the Tourism Ministry’s deputy assistant for Asia-Pacific tourism promotion.
“We would like to thank Minister Arief Yahya on working with travel agents and media to convince more to visit,” said Jemadu.
Yahya personally traveled to Beijing this month to hold meetings with companies engaged in the tourism industry, like meeting with Alitrip of e-commerce giant Alibaba, and do promotional events.
“For this occasion, I invite Chinese citizens to travel to Indonesia, including to Bali. Please celebrate Imlek, the New Year in a beautiful place and TripAdvisor’s number one destination in the world in 2017,” Yahya had said.
To attract Chinese tourists to Bali and other destinations in the archipelago, the Indonesian Tourism Ministry ran campaigns with Chinese TV stations, put up banner promotions in Chiense digital media, made familiarization trips to different outlets, and held big press gatherings in Xian, Beijing, and Guangzhou.
China is Bali’s biggest supplier of foreign tourists. Chinese tourists dominated Bali’s foreign arrivals for the first 11 months of 2017, accounting for more than a quarter of foreign tourists during that period.
Bali’s tourism market did, however, take a major downturn in the final stretch of 2017 with volcanic activity from Mount Agung discouraging travelers to vacation on the island. And now that the island is in the peak of rainy season, Bali is right in its low season, anyway. So, the mass influx of tourists will surely be a welcome bombardment by many tourism industry players who have experienced slow times in recent weeks and months.
