Denpasar, Bali (ANTARA) - The Denpasar Tourism Office, Bali, will enforce new regulations for traveling in the area to stem the spread of the new variant of COVID-19, Omicron.
"We do not want to be fooled after the exposure of tourists from East Java following their vacation to Bali due to the Omicron variant. Hence, we will enforce new travel rules," Head of the office Dezire Mulyani stated here on Wednesday.
From the existing supervisory and health procedures, Mulyani said her side had issued new travel regulations, specifically by focusing on massive monitoring and conducting inspection to check implementation of health protocols for tourists entering tourist destinations, hotels, and malls in Denpasar.
"We will massively monitor and inspect the implementation of health protocols at tourist attractions in the Denpasar, Bali area. It will be conducted by the Village Task Force of each region to keep an eye on tourist activities during their visit to tourist objects," she affirmed.
Mulyani later noted that the Denpasar Tourism Office had recently held a meeting. The Denpasar mayor will also issue a Circular Letter (SE) on the regulation to implement health protocols and supervise tourist destinations.
During the 2021 Christmas and 2022 New Year holidays, the authority recorded that hotel occupancy rates in Denpasar had increased to 60 percent and tourist visits to Denpasar grew by 45 percent.
"Hopefully, such conditions would continue, but we also do not want to create tourism clusters. Therefore, we will tighten supervision and massively implement health protocols for tourists through the use of the PeduliLindungi application that will be implemented in tourist destinations in the Denpasar area," she remarked.
Earlier, on January 3, 2022, the Bali Province's COVID-19 Handling Task Force confirmed negative results of a PCR-based swab test on 11 hotel employees, who had come in close contact with tourists from Surabaya that were exposed to Omicron.
