Travel agency to be summoned over stranded visitors

Bali Liang, a local association of travel agencies and tour operators focusing on Chinese visitors, will summon the management of a local tour operator following a recent incident in which hundreds of Chinese tourists were stranded for hours upon their arrival at Ngurah Rai International Airport after their pick-up buses didn’t show up.

“We will summon them and ask them to clarify the matter. At this point, we cannot conclusively state that the tour operator deliberately mistreated their clients.

Therefore, we cannot dispense any sanctions, yet. We will also summon all our members to prevent any similar occurrence from taking place in the future,” Bali Liang chairman Hartono said.

Separately, an executive with the local chapter of the Association of Indonesia Tour and Travel Agencies (ASITA), Eddy Sanyoto, said that the association had contacted several relevant parties to find out more about the incident. “We received a report that the Chinese visitors, who arrived on several different flights, were upset and confused when their pick-up buses did not show up.

They flocked to the airport’s arrival terminal and eventually attracted the attention of the staff of several travel agencies in the location. These staff assisted the visitors in contacting their travel agency,” Sanyoto said.

They said that the travel agency was Santa Bali, which according to Hartono had a very good reputation. The incident took place on Jan. 25 and affected around 400 visitors who had traveled to Bali to celebrate Chinese New Year.

Santa Bali’s supervisor Wayan Rencana confirmed the incident but denied that the agency had deliberately neglected their clients. Instead, he argued that the agency had experienced a technical problem due to the unusually large number of clients it was serving that day.

“On that day, our agency had to arrange airport pick-ups for 28 groups of Chinese visitors, with each group comprising around 40 persons. The available fleet of vehicles was simply inadequate to deal with the large number of visitors, which resulted in some having to wait longer than usual,” he said, adding that eventually all of the arrivals had been picked up by Santa Bali’s fleet of cars and driven to their respective hotels.

“We have also already apologized to the guests for the inconvenience. Moreover, we have offered cash compensation of Rp 1.5 million (US$167) for the guests. Around half of all of the visitors who experienced the delay have accepted the cash compensation.”