Travel bureaus in Bali have been forced to bring in Mandarin-speaking tour guides from other regions to cater to the rising number of tourists from China, especially during holidays like the Chinese New Year.

 

The chairman of the Association of Indonesian Tours and Travel Agencies’ (Asita) Bali branch, I Ketut Ardana, said that Bali currently was experiencing a shortfall in tour guides for Chinese tourists who depended on the guides’ services in exploring the island. This, according to Ardana, was because the number of Chinese tourists visiting Bali kept increasing year after year, especially during the Imlek holiday.

 

Bringing in tour guides from outside Bali, he said, had been a common practice for the last few years to make up the shortfall. They were mostly brought from Jakarta, Medan and Bangka Belitung. Ardana said that ahead of this year’s Imlek, which falls on Feb. 19, at least 10 travel agencies in Bali had informed the association that they needed an additional 200 Mandarin-speaking tour guides.

 

There are 40 members of the association’s Bali Liang division specially offering services for the Chinese market.

 

“The need could be far more than 200 when all the member travel agencies have submitted their demands for additional tour guides,”Ardana said. Bali Liang’s secretary Tri Anggarani Dewi concurred, saying that her company, Tjendana Mandra Sakti (TMS), had for the last few years always needed an additional 150 Mandarin-speaking tour guides during the Imlek celebration.

 

“Chinese tourists spend five days here on average and are always in need of a tour guide’s full assistance even for simple things as almost all of them cannot speak any foreign languages,” Dewi said.

 

To help ease the challenge, she added, as of last year TMS had been providing Mandarin language courses and tips on communicating with Chinese tourists to tour guides operating on the island.

 

She added that only authorized guides with licenses issued by the Bali provincial administration were allowed to operate in the province.Data from the Bali provincial tourism agency show there were 8,334 authorized guides speaking a total of 14 languages. Of them, however, only 1,048 speak Mandarin.

 

Last year Bali received 585,000 Chinese tourist visits, a sharp increase from the previous year, which saw only 387,000 Chinese tourists.

 

The figure contributed 15.57 percent of the total 3,766,638 foreign tourists visiting the island in 2014.The chairman of the Association of Indonesian Tourism Industry Association’s (GIPI) Bali branch, Ida Bagus Ngurah Wijaya, said that the island had long been a favorite destination for Chinese tourists.