What Bali can teach Phuket

Yet visitors from many of these countries are slowly returning to Bali, more than two years after a terrorist bomb killed some 200 people at a disco on this tropical island. They come to pay their respects — and have a good time by the beach.

Now, Bali's response to the tragedy — its respect for the dead, its readiness to get on with life — suggests there is light at the end of the tsunami tunnel for devastated holiday destinations across Asia.

As Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Maldives try to rebuild their crippled tourist industries and restore overseas markets in the wake of the Dec. 26 killer waves, there are lessons to be learned from the Indonesian experience.

Terrorism and tsunamis are different kinds of disasters, but a similar formula is required to engineer an economic recovery from either.

For decades, Bali branded itself as a tropical paradise, attracting hordes of downmarket Australian surfers and upmarket Europeans with a taste for Hindu dances and hedonistic spas.

The bomb blasts, detonated on Oct. 12, 2002, by hard-line Indonesian Islamists with a grudge against Westerners, shattered that peaceful image.

Tourist arrivals plunged, occupancy rates at luxury hotels fell to about 10 per cent and revenues shrunk by nearly half. The island's economy, dependent on tourism for 60 per cent of its income, sputtered.

But the fallout spread even further. A generation of hospitality workers who'd long since left the rice farms suddenly had no work. The economic damage was compounded by psychological depression.

These are precisely the post-tsunami problems facing affected regions in Southeast Asia. .

"The main challenge was how to recover the psychological morale of tourism enterprises in Bali, including people in the community," says I Gde Pitana, who headed the government tourism office here in 2002.

"After the bombing, everything was so quiet — everyone spent their time daydreaming and the roads were empty."

Pitana, who teaches tourism studies at Udayana University, says man-made and natural disasters share the same problem: "how to maintain the optimism of the people."

Staying alive means retaining tourist arrivals at all costs — not merely to maintain cash flow, but also to sustain self-esteem.

"It's more important to get tourists through the door to keep the staff employed," says John Koldowski of the Bangkok-based Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA).

"Unless you get the tourists back, you'll have a second disaster economically as people are laid off. You need to keep people working. You're giving them back their self-confidence.

"They want to be of service to visitors."

Asia's tourism industry not only needs to get workers back on the job, it also must hire and train new employees to replace those who perished in the disaster, Koldowski adds.

A significant number of the tsunami casualties in Phuket and Sri Lanka were hotel workers on duty when disaster struck.

Koldowski says Bali could serve as a model of how to stay on course both commercially and psychologically. Immediately after the 2002 bombings, religious and government leaders organized elaborate prayer ceremonies that eased local anxieties about bad karma.

Thai beach resorts on the island of Phuket followed that lesson last month.

"The biggest challenge is trying to allay superstitious fears roaming the coasts ... by holding prayers for placating the spirits," says Koldowski.

The themes of sustainability and continuity found a powerful echo in Phuket last week when delegates from 40 countries attended an emergency meeting of the U.N.'s World Tourism Organization.

The tsunami was "the greatest catastrophe ever recorded in the history of world tourism," said WTO chief Francesco Frangialli.

"We must rapidly restore jobs and hope," he stressed. "A quick return to living conditions and professional activity that are as close to normal as possible constitutes the best form of aid."

Tourism is a $120 billion industry across the region, contributing vital foreign exchange to developing countries and sustaining 19 million jobs in Southeast Asia.

Tourism accounts for 12 per cent of economic activity in Thailand and 10 per cent in Sri Lanka, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.

But how do you persuade tourists to return so soon after thousands of foreigners were evacuated in a panic?

Bali rebuilt its brand by tenaciously beating the drums of discount tourism and reassuring people that this tropical paradise was ready to receive them again in a safe environment. It boosted security, used the down time to upgrade facilities, worked with airlines to restore cancelled flights and sought out new markets.

Now, business is back. Tourist arrivals have returned to the pre-2002 level of about 1.5 million visitors a year and hotels are once again fully booked in high season.

But the recovery is not quite complete. Long-haul tourists from Europe and North America are still keeping their distance, forcing Bali to drum up business closer to home from markets like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and China.

"We're much more dependent on the Asian market," says Robert Kelsall, head of Casa Grande, Bali's local hotel association.

Regional and domestic tourists tend to stay for shorter vacations and spend less than visitors from the West, so the multiplier effect on the local economy is weaker.

"It's not the bread and butter market that Bali historically enjoyed," Kelsall concedes.

Putu Antara, head of Bali's tourism board, adds that the recovery looks robust in terms of tourist numbers but still suffers from the reduced spending of Asian visitors.

"We have high-end markets and we need those tourists — we can't operate with low prices," Antara says. "Getting the client back requires a big effort, and we've been suffering for two years."

Tourism professionals in Bali and across Asia say a recurring problem is the travel advisories issued by foreign governments on their websites and publicized in the media.

Too often, they say, tourists get blanket warnings to stay away from entire countries when the problem can be quite localized.

Bali, for example, was hard hit by government advisories cautioning against travel to Indonesia after more terrorist bombings in Jakarta — a suicide attack on the J.W. Marriott Hotel in 2003 and another last year at the Australian embassy.

Yet the island of Bali is relatively far removed from the tumult of the capital.

Similarly, many Thai beach resorts that were unaffected by the tsunami damage to Phuket island suffered when embassies issued broad warnings about the country, says PATA's Koldowski.

Even Bali suffered some cancellations last month when Chinese tour groups assumed that malaria outbreaks in the tsunami-affected region of Aceh might pose a risk — even though the beaches of Bali are a four-hour flight across the Indonesian archipelago.

"We need to educate consumers that it wasn't all of Thailand that was affected, just part of the coast," says Koldowski. "We need to get the geography right."

Sri Lankan hotels are bearing the brunt of the latest Canadian government travel advisory, which contains a stark, blanket warning: "Canadian tourists should not travel to Sri Lanka."

According to PATA, 283 out of 6,639 hotels in Thailand were damaged or destroyed, while 49 out of 246 were affected in Sri Lanka.

A soon as the bricks and mortar are back in place, Koldowski says, these countries need to send the message to tourists that the welcome mat has been laid out again.

Bali has put the bombing behind it but not buried its memories. The government has built an impressive memorial on the site where Paddy's disco was blasted to smithereens in the heart of Kuta's nightclub district.

Standing at the monument's sun-baked stone plaza, Dutch tourist Louys Lans says he came to pay his respects to the dead.

"For me, it's so terrible that so many Indonesians also died," says Lans, whose mother was Indonesian.

"But I'm not afraid any more. As you can see, many tourists are here today, even from Australia. Only the Americans are staying away."