Destinations known | Chinese tourists are changing Bali, but they are not the first ones to do so. Who made Kuta ‘the worst place’ on the island?
Tourism officials worry an increase in zero-dollar tours from China will cheapen Bali’s image, but the Island of the Gods has long been shaped by those who holiday there
Although Indonesia is made up of more than 17,000 islands, only one is truly world famous: Bali.
When travel writer W. R. Foran – author of snappily titled guide book Travel Through the Mystic Isles of Java, Sumatra and Bali with the Orient Touring Company (circa 1925) – visited in the early 1920s, he wrote: “Bali, the island immediately east of Java, is so easily accessible that it must inevitably be flooded with tourists.” He was not wrong.
By the 70s, mass tourism was in full swing, led by Australians in search of sun, surf and spirituality. But now Antipodean arrivals are outnumbered and some people are not happy about it, at least according to an August 26 article in The Sydney Morning Herald.
The number of Australian tourists in Bali peaked at 1.1 million in 2016, before dropping to 1 million in 2017, compared with 986,000 Chinese arrivals in 2016 and 1.4 million last year. The shift in demographics has already had an impact on Bali’s tourist landscape, most notably in the appearance of zero-dollar tours.
Speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald, Bali Tourism Board chairman Ida Bagus Agung Partha Adnyana said that the number of Chinese visitors on “zero-dollar” tours – on which sightseers are strong-armed into shopping at businesses where all profits are siphoned back to China – could be as high as 70 per cent.