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STATE-Owned Enterprises (BUMN) PT Pelabuhan Indonesia or Pelindo Sub Regional III Bali and Nusa Tenggara received requests from a number of foreign cruise ship operators to dock at Benoa Harbor, Denpasar, Bali for 2024, increasing by 45%.
“There are already people who have registered and there is an increase of around 45% from this year,” said Head of Pelindo Sub Regional III Bali and Nusa Tenggara, Ali Sodikin in Denpasar, Friday (10/06), 2023.
Based on Pelindo data, the number of cruise ships docking at Benoa Harbor in Denpasar from January to October 6 2023 reached 30 cruise ships carrying 21,679 passengers. This number has increased significantly compared to 2022, reaching 14 cruise ships carrying almost 7,000 passengers.
This increase, he said, was in line with the end of the COVID-19 pandemic status and the opening of Indonesian tourism so that restrictions on human mobility between countries were increasingly relaxed. In fact, in 2025 online registration for foreign cruise ships will begin to dock at Benoa Harbor, Denpasar.
Ali Sodikin added that in the Benoa Harbor area, the Bali Maritime Tourism Center is being built to receive visits from cruise ships and is also targeting it as a base for cruise ships to dock.
“So, the hope is that the Indonesian people, especially in Bali, if they want to take a cruise ship, they don’t need to leave the country, so they can just go from Bali and they can go on a cruise ship,” he said.
There was also one of the jumbo cruise ships that stopped at Benoa Harbor, namely the MSC Magnifica, which carried 2,042 passengers and 928 crew members on Tuesday (4/4). The docking of the Panama-flagged ship became new history because it was the first time it served the largest cruise ship carrying the most passengers disembarking.
The cruise ship is 293.8 meters long and weighs 95,128 gross tons. To improve cruise ship services at Benoa Harbor, a number of facilities have been prepared at the passenger terminal, including rupiah currency exchange, automated teller machines, information booths and Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) booths. [antaranews]
