By IPS Correspondents
SINGAPORE, Dec 16 2002 (IPS)

Two months after the Bali blasts, South-east Asian countries are busy working on a homemade remedy – regional travel – to make up for the slack on tourism during what should be a much busier travel season.

After reeling from the shock of the car bomb attacks on a Bali nightclub on Oct. 12, which killed nearly 200 people, and the travel warnings by western governments, including Australia, the Indonesian, Malaysian and Thai governments not been taking matters sitting down.

On Monday, Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong was in Indonesia to show support for Indonesia after the October blasts.

Last week, Indonesia organised a two-day tourism promotion meeting in Bali, attended by senior officials from the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Japan to work out ways to restore regional tourism.

There may be some encouraging signs in the fact that a special promotion offered recently by Singapore International Airlines to Bali from here was snapped up by 10,000 people in just 11 days.

Since December, planeloads of Singaporeans have been travelling to Bali on a special package starting at 288 Singapore dollars (168 U.S. dollars), which includes airfares, hotel transfers and two nights’ accommodation.

Singapore Airlines says its flights to Bali are running at almost full capacity and see this as an encouraging sign that ”tourism will, over time, return to previous levels in Bali”.

Since the October blast, Bali’s hotels have been all but deserted.

Ricardo Castaneda, general manager of Melia Bali hotel, told Singapore’s ‘New Paper’ that the SIA promotion has helped to get the hotel industry to breathe in some fresh air.

After all, his hotel’s occupancy rate dropped from between 85 to 93 percent before the October blast to 14 percent in November. The occupancy rate has now climbed to 83 percent with ”majority of the guests coming to the resort SIA passengers”, he said.

A travel consultant for Kent Holidays tour company here added that the Bali packages are fully booked for December and only a few are still available for January. ”Many come to us and ask for the package, but we don’t have any available,” she said.

”We were planning to go to Australia, but decided to take the Bali package with two days’ extension,” explained Dallas, a young Singaporean checking in at Singapore Airlines counter at the airport here.

Asked about the safety factor, she replied, ”I think the security will be stricter there.” Her boyfriend Gopal added, ”Every country is the same now, even Australia is not safe any more.”

It is this factor of feeling safe in your own backyard that the region’s governments are trying to tap into by offers like that of Singapore Airlines.

Tourism, after all, is a major dollar earner for ASEAN countries, bringing in some 26 billion dollars annually.

Last year 41 million tourists visited the 10 ASEAN countries. Cash-strapped Indonesia is expected to lose as much as 1 billion dollars in the coming year after the attacks on Bali, which as the country’s top tourist destination had 1.35 million foreign visitors last year.

Many countries have been unhappy with the haste with which Western countries issued travel warnings to South-east Asia – a sentiment aired publicly by ASEAN diplomats at the group’s summit in Cambodia in November.

”This time last year, the world was recovering from the shocks of the World Trade Centre attacks,” explained Karim Raslan, a Malaysian lawyer, in a column in Singapore’s ‘Straits Times’ newspaper a few days ago. ”An outpouring of support, both moral and economic, came when it was needed most …. visitors came in droves to show their support”.

”But, two months after the bombings in Bali, the silence here is almost deafening. Where are the Bali boosters?” he asked. ”No one in London or New York has talked about rallying around a scarred Bali, a deeply traumatised Indonesia or even a shaken South-east Asia.”

The difference may lie in the fact that Western governments fear that developing, and South-east Asian countries, are not able to counter security threats as well as they do, said Benjamin Goldsmith, a political science lecturer at the National University of Singapore.

This attitude was reflected in threats made by Australian Prime Minister John Howard earlier this month to take pre-emptive, anti-terrorism strikes in ASEAN countries.

Last week, the retired commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Dennis Blair, told a regional security conference here that ASEAN and the ASEAN Regional Forum, its forum for security dialogue, are moving too slowly and ineffectively to counter security threats in the region.

But rather than wait for Western governments to declare the area safe for travelers, South-east Asian countries are encouraging Asians to spend their holidays in the region, or even within their own countries.

Indonesia is altering its national holidays next year to move these to Mondays, so that Indonesians can travel within their country during these long weekends.

During the six-day holiday for the ‘Hari Raya’ festival early this month, marking the end of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, the Indonesian government encouraged them to visit Bali to support the ailing tourism industry.

Meanwhile, Bali is sending a team of 18 performing artistes and two child painters with 50 children’s paintings on a tour of Japan starting this week.

The mission aims to convince the Japanese – who traditionally account for the largest number of tourists visiting Bali – to come back to the idyllic island.

”The event will be a good opportunity for us to show the world that the terrible tragedy has failed to destroy us, that life in Bali goes on,” said I Gde Pitana Brahmananda, chief of the Bali Tourism Authority.

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