Here at The Bali Sun, we take travel safety very seriously indeed. From scams to theft, political unrest to natural disasters, part of our job as Bali’s leading English-language travel news outlet is to bring our readers up-to-the-minute information on travel safety.
Right now, our live Travel Safety Index is giving an ‘elevated’ reading; here is everything you need to know.
Avid The Bali Sun Readers will already be familiar with our Traveler Safety Index, but since we actually only launched this tool a couple of months ago, how about we cover the basics again? The Bali Sun Traveler Safety Index is a tool we have created with our partners over at Travel Off Path.
The index is a traveler-driven tool that uses real-time, subjective user feedback to generate safety scores for every destination worldwide, from London to Sydney, LA to Paris, and everywhere in between. Of course, we’ve created a version that homes in directly on Bali.
The metric the index uses is a Hybrid Verification Model. In technical terms, this means our proprietary algorithm calculates real-time sentiment based on recency, and every single data trend is subject to a Mandatory 24-Hour Editorial Audit.
In practical terms, for travelers and tourists, this means that it is real humans (aka our editorial team) who review the data spikes every single day to ensure anomalies are filtered out before they impact the final safety grade. These kinds of anomalies include bot attacks or viral misinformation.
Now is a good moment to mention that just like our news reporting, The Bali Sun Traveler Safety Index is not generated or even influenced by AI.
Our daily news articles, travel advice columns, and Travel Safety Index are 100% human, and always will be. We can promise you that.
This week, it has been confirmed by the Bali Central Statistics Agency that there have been some weird things happening with the travel data in the last couple of months. Hotel occupancy is up across the island, but travel arrival figures are down. Only marginally through.
The Head of the Bali Statistics Agency (BPS) Agus Gede Hendrayana Hermawan told reporters this week,” This is somewhat contradictory. Foreign tourists have decreased, but the TPK [hotel occupancy] has increased. Usually, April tends to see an increase, if we look at the TPK figures for the past two years. However, this time it’s an anomaly because foreign tourists have decreased.”
There are a number of reasons behind this, not least the conflict in the Middle East continuing to impact travellers’ decisions worldwide. Focusing on Bali, though, while there are no active embassy alerts or security alerts for travellers in Bali, the Traveler Safety Index is now reading at 73/100.
This is a notable drop from a ‘stable’ 85/100 just a few weeks ago. Again, there are a number of reasons behind this, including that more people are making reports using the tool.
As has been the case since we launched The Bali Sun Traveler Safety Index, the most reported incident of safety concern is scams. With 85 reports lodged on the index at the moment, scams are the most widely reported issue by tourists by a long way. The next most reported safety concern is harassment, with 19 reports, and theft with 11 reports.
Issues like discrimination, active conflict, and civil unrest, which would be rife in other parts of the world, are being reported once.
In practice, then, what does this mean for tourists traveling to Bali? It means enjoy your vacation, but be mindful of scams. This includes being sold overpriced tours, fake tickets, the classic currency exchange scam, and scams from taxi drivers.
All in all, we here at The Bali Sun see this ‘elevated’ safety rating as simply an increased awareness. Our advice: stay sharp and enjoy the sunshine.
Discover more from The Bali Sun
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.