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Tourism is highly suspectible to external disturbances, because of the nature of tourism itself, which is image-dependent, non-dependent, non-compulsory travel, and predominantly leisure-seeking activites. Natural disasters as well as human-made tragedies often shake tourism development, as seen in the case of earthquake in Yogyakarta, tsunami in Aceh, Thailand and India, or bombing in Luxor (Egypt), Thailand, and Bali. After the tragedy, stakeholders of tourism in beach destination tried hard to recover the industry in various ways. In the process of recovery, questions arise, such as whether at a given time the tourism has or has not been recovered. Contradicting views often occur, with the difference indicators used in judging the 'recovery' state such as the number of international arrival, room occupancy rate, the effect of tourism on the general economy, etc, and in most cases only a single factor is considered. This paper is concerned with such an issue, by taking Bali as a case study. It is concluded that various indicators must be used in combination, to have a comprehensive judgement of the recovery state. This is more so because, in most cases, the tragedy is not the only factor causing the decrease of one indicator, say, room occupancy rate. The oversupply situation is yet another factor that needs to be seriously taken into account. |
