Many Japanese Tourists Cansel Their Trips To Bali

Denpasar (Antara Bali) - Japanese tourists had canceled at least 1,000 rooms at a number of hotels in Bali following the devastating quake and subsequent tsunami which hit their country last Friday.

"At first the number of hotel rooms that had been canceled was not so many, but increased to 1,000 after the quake and tsunami had caused a leak in their nuclear reactor," the Bali tourism board coordinator Ida Bagus Ngurah Wijaya  said here Friday.

On the fourth and fifth day following the quake and subsequent tsunami, especially after the nuclear reactor has developed a leak, many more of the Japanese tourists had canceled their trip to the island paradise, causing a great deal of loss to the hotel owners, he said.

However, he fully understood the reason of the Japanese tourists to cancel their holidays to Bali.

Ngurah Wijaya also admitted that the decline in the number of Japanese tourists to Bali had actually been going in 2009 and 2010, reaching 25 pct.

The number of Japanese tourists in Sanur alone, he said, reached only 20 percent of the total number of foreign tourists from other countries.

Therefore he is considering special measures and plans to promote the island paradise in Japan because their number had always been more than those of other countries, and its first position has even been taken over by Australia.(*)