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THE I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport management, Bali recorded as many as 540,230 foreign tourists entering the island of Bali via airways during January 2020.
“With that number, there is a fairly high growth of 17 percent when compared to the record in January 2019, which was 463,285 foreign tourists entering Bali through Ngurah Rai Airport,” said General Manager of PT Angkasa Pura I (Persero) I Gusti Ngurah International Airport Rai, Bali, Herry AY Sikado, in his official statement received at Mangupura, Badung.
He explained, from these achievements tourists from China ranked first with a total of 113,646, or accounted for 21 percent of the total foreign tourists who entered Bali via air.
Then foreign tourists from Australia and India occupy the second and third ranks as the largest contributor to tourists, each with a total of 105,575 people and 30,324 people.
“We started 2020 with a very good record. As before, the top three biggest contributing tourist countries were China, Australia and India. The three countries contributed 249,545 tourists or 46 percent of the total tourists we served in that period.” he said.
Herry Sikado added, in January, his party also welcomed the opening of two new flight routes for international routes.
The new route opened is the airline from Vietnam, VietJet Air, which opens the Hanoi-Bali flight route, and the national airline, Citilink, which opens the flight route Bali-Melbourne, Australia.
“Surely this is a good thing and makes Ngurah Rai Airport more connected to various major cities in the world,” said Herry Sikado.
He added, related to the outbreak of COVID-19 or Corona Virus in a number of other countries, it is likely that this will have an impact on the number of foreign tourists arriving in Bali in the period of February and beyond.
This is not separated from several factors. One of the primary factors is the temporary closure of flight operations to and from China to an undetermined deadline.
“It is undeniable that so far tourists from China have almost always been the most tourists we serve. This will certainly have enough impact in the future. However, our priority is to continue to provide the best service to every passenger at our airport,” he said. [antaranews/photo special]
