Indonesia wants tourists to forget Thailand and travel to Bali

Bali : The Bali Chapter of the Indonesian Tourist Industry Association (GIPI) sees the situation in Thailand as an opportunity for Bali to boost the number of foreign tourists, especially because Thailand’s coastal tourist destinations, including Phuket, are competing with the Island of the Gods, as Bali is also known.

The Jakarta Post reported: 

“Bali will see an increase in the number of foreign tourists who initially planned to visit Thailand but then canceled their trip,” said GIPI Bali chairman Ida Bagus Ngurah Wijaya as quoted by kompas.com.

“Of course we do not wish for conflict in other countries, but the military coup increases the number of foreign tourists to Bali,” he said, adding that the data would only be ready in June.

A military coup was launched in Thailand on Thursday last week, during a meeting of political rivals in what was billed as a second round of talks on how to resolve the country’s political deadlock.

Visitors to Thailand may fall by 5 percent this year, the biggest drop since 2009, according to the Pacific Asia Travel Association in Bangkok, as reported by Bloomberg.

Foreign arrivals already dropped by 4.9 percent in the first four months of this year from a year earlier to 8.62 million, according to Thailand Department of Tourism.

There are at least 45 countries worldwide, including the US, the UK, France, Canada, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the Philippines, that have issued travel warnings following the coup.

Indonesia’s national flag carrier, Garuda Indonesia, has decided to decrease its flight frequency to Bangkok from June 1 to July 24, following the decreasing load factor over the past weeks.

“Due to decreasing demand following the current political situation in Thailand, from June 1 to July 24, Garuda will decrease its flight frequency from Jakarta to Bangkok to two flights per day from three flights per day previously,” Garuda spokesperson Ikhsan Rosan said on Monday.

Ikhsan said the load factor from Jakarta to Bangkok declined to 60 percent following last Thursday’s coup, from between 70 and 75 percent previously. Load factor indicates the amount of weight of cargo and number of passengers that an aircraft can carry.

“Around 20 to 30 percent of customers have canceled their flights. We saw decreasing demand,” Ikhsan added.

Indonesia Air Ticketing Companies Association (Astindo) has estimated a 30 percent decrease in demand to travel to Thailand from Indonesia within at least the next two or three months, according to the association’s chairperson Elly Hutabarat.

“Thailand offers a lot of interesting tourist destinations, however, safety remains number one. It is inevitable that tourists are worried that there might be an airport closure,” Elly said.

“The army-imposed curfew also reduces tourists’ comfort, as they obviously don’t want to spend their nights in hotel rooms during holidays,” she continued.

Indonesian Tour and Travel Agencies (Asita) chairman Asnawi Bahar said should the conflict last longer than predicted, it would significantly affect the number of outbound tourists from Indonesia. The number of foreign tourists that visited Thailand in 2012 reached 22.3 million.

Around 6.4 million were from fellow ASEAN countries, data from the ASEAN Secretariat show

June 2, 2014