Indonesia wants to ban backpackers from Bali, but will a focus on ‘quality’ tourists pay off?
- In a bid to rejuvenate the island’s pandemic-hammered tourism sector, an official has floated the idea of ‘filtering’ visitors once it reopens to foreigners
- While reports of badly behaved overseas guests mean some back the decision, others say it’s a move away from Bali’s history that may further hit business
Luhut Pandjaitan, the coordinating minister for maritime affairs and investment, made the comment on September 10 when he visited Bali, adding that the island’s reopening would be “conducted carefully and in phases”.
“We will filter tourists that visit,” he said. “We do not want backpackers, so that Bali [remains] clean, and the tourists who come here are of quality.”
Luhut told reporters in a virtual news briefing on Friday that the government was confident Bali could reopen in October if Covid-19 cases continued to decline.
“With a trend [of declining cases] like today, we are quite confident, but again we have to look at [the situation on a weekly basis]. We can’t take it for granted,” he said, responding to a question from This Week in Asia, though he stopped short of clarifying whether backpackers would be allowed entry when the resort island reopened.
Indonesia on Friday recorded 3,835 new infections and 219 deaths, well below the daily average of 40,000 cases during the peak of the second wave in July.