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Public policies for tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic
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The Nusa Dua Beach Hotel & Spa Bali has asked visitors to comply with COVID-19 policies as the resort joins a pilot project to open under new health protocols. (Nusa Dua Beach Hotel & Spa/File)
H
ow to treat the tourism sector during the COVID-19 pandemic is dilemmatic. On the one hand, promoting tourism activities will increase people’s mobility, thus heightening the probability of COVID-19 spread. On the other hand, we need to support tourism businesses as they have been under pressure for more than one year, pushing some business players to exit the sector after suffering heavy financial losses.
As the tourism sector has been under pressure for a long period, since April 2020, many hotels and tourism businesses have gone bankrupt. For this reason, we need to find a way to support businesses, especially hotels, so they will not go bankrupt. The next step is how to help them recover quickly to anticipate increasing demand once the pandemic is over.
What policies are appropriate for the tourism sector during the pandemic? Currently, we believe the main goal of public policy in tourism is to support the survivability of businesses instead of promoting demand.
COVID-19 cases have increased in the last two weeks almost in all provinces. The number of positive cases continues to increase, with the highest number occurring on Sunday, June 27, with 21,342 cases. As a comparison, on Thursday, June 17, the number of daily additional cases at the national level reached 12,624. The increase in COVID-19 cases is believed to be due to high people’s mobility during the Idul Fitri holiday, decreased adherence to health protocols and the new Delta variant of COVID-19.
Correspondingly, primary tourist destinations such as Bali may inevitably be depressed again. The number of COVID-19 cases in Bali has also increased in the last few days. The condition of Bali's tourism is very stressed, as indicated by the occupancy rate, which was only 10.09 percent in April 2020. The occupancy rate in Bali is still the lowest when compared to other provinces.
We see that the government has launched a number of programs to help the tourism sector.
First, the government introduced the Work From Bali (WFB) drive, through which people are invited to work from Bali. Currently, the chosen location for WFB is the Nusa Dua area. Workers traveling in and out of Bali under this program must go through a stringent screening process so as not to increase the number of cases.
