Bali Care / Bali Tourism Blog

Global economic crisis may have held back massive investment plan to build Lombok into a world class holiday destination on its own and cut away any dependencies to its more popular sister island of Bali. But its charm remains an attractive magnet to holiday makers seeking for sea, sand, and sun and get a bit bored with what Bali has to offer.

In our last business trip to Lombok a few days back we found that flights between Bali and Lombok are almost full. The small airport of Mataram is quite busy. During the night we spent in Senggigi, the most popular beach resort town in Lombok, we saw a lot of tourists around. We even rejected by a restaurant because whilst there was still a few tables empty, they thought they would not be able to serve as in reasonable speed.

Our trip to the Gilis strengthen our impression. The public boat taking people for a short 30 minutes trip to the islands were easily filled up. When we got to the island we saw it rather busy with a lot of tourists - mostly white - scattering around. Hotel operators and restaurant owners told us that their days are normally even busier.

As we inspected a number of Lombok villas, the main purpose of our trip, we also seeing the same pictures. We even have to reschedule our inspection until guests went away to the beach or something, just because they are fully occupied. Similar situation also applies in domestic market. We went to downtown Mataram and found out that traditional restaurants, motels, malls, even street side stalls were busy.

With all those frames portrayed the current situation, when the investment postponed, I can imagine how Lombok will grow when the investment plan resumed. I am not an economist myself, but everybody knows that the global economic crisis has gone away, and massive investments will flood in in just a matter of days. Will Bali loose or benefit from this?

It is clear that Bali led the emerge of online marketing in Indonesia. It is obvious that Bali is home to most successful online entrepreneurs as well as most seasoned online marketing specialists in the country. Multi-million dollars of various products - from tourism to real estate - have been traded every year from Bali, online.

Those successful online marketing elites have gone through a lot of stressful experience. Just like in any other side of our life, their success was not achieved instantly in a blink. Just like anything else in our life, when you are short in financial capital you have to be prepared to spend more in other sides, brain, time, and energy.

It is widely known that one the most prominent factor of their success is SEO, the free way to drive tons of business leads from popular search engine, to our online shop. That is 100% correct. With successful SEO, we are not only getting visitors to our shop, those visitors need our merchandise.

Unfortunately as crowd of followers comes in expectation of slice of the fortune, most of them swept away in disappointment. Many of those who failed to secure their slot in online marketing success have spend their sweat on a finally successful SEO effort. But still, as they are getting flood of traffic into their websites, none of them buys.

I have been in online marketing for more than a decade, enough time to see those rises and falls. In my early days I was in fact struggling the same experience as well. The most prominent mistake in my view is that people believes that SEO is everything. A kind of “When you get your website floats to the first page of Google, you will start to get flood of dollars into your pocket”.

That believe is damn wrong. Online marketing is no difference in principle with brick and mortar business. Online marketing has SEO (and many other methods) to bring visitors into the online shop. Brick and mortar business has the same stage in different form, media advertising for example.

As you get flood of visitors hit your doorsteps, another critical step kicks in. You have to make them find what they need in your online shop, convinced that you are the right place to buy it, and pull their wallet. These process includes a lot of things, from the way you arrange and present the products in your website to competitive price.

Is SEO important, YES. But it is only one in a series of long and exhaustive process. Will you fail without it, maybe, but not necessarily. There are many other ways to drive traffic of visitors to a website, PPC, banner exchange, affiliate marketing, are just to name some.

I hope it gives you a better insight in relationship between SEO and Online Marketing.

Holiday rental business has grown into commercial scale from its initial stage when wealthy villa owners wanted to get a little income to cover costs of maintaining their villas by renting them out whilst they were not occupying them. As time goes by, villa rental has grown into a maturity. Most Bali villas are no longer maintained by the owners’ maids, but professionally managed to offer the same service quality of five-star resorts. These days, many investors build private villas solely on commercial objective.

However, no matter how mature the service excellent has grew, private villas remains as private property of the owner which inherit personal taste and style of the owners. Professional management companies may be able to bring service excellent to certain high quality standard, but who could standardize people’s personal taste? In that very sense, getting consistent offerings like luxurious hotel chains is hard to achieve in villa rental industry.

This is the main reason why offline travel agents, selling their products through physical outlets, find it difficult to sell villa accommodation. Another reason is private villas only have one selling unit per property, compared to resort hotels which have hundreds of rooms to sell in one single property. Creating product package, preparing sales material, and similar efforts are not economically viable only to sell one selling unit per property.

Therefore so far private villas remains very dependent to online rental agents, featuring the villas in network of their business. Low cost of creating and managing websites makes online marketing fits the nature of one selling unit per property nature. In fact, once a website completed, the only costs on featuring a new villa is five minutes of time. “All of our business comes through website, and guests referred by happy clients, which initially came from our websites”, Wisna Wedhana of Private Leisure International, villa rental agents representing Bali and Thailand villas said.

Most of these rental agents got their business solely from their websites. In most cases, they never make any traditional advertising. “Website can reach everyone allover the globe at one cost. If you place an and on The New York Times, you will only reach people in New York. Imagine how much you have to spend if you want to reach the whole world”, the Chairman of Bali Villa Rental Association exposed the logic. No wonder why Bali SEO and Bali web design consultants are packed by villa rental clientele.

Economists will definitely confirm that it is real. There are a lot of evidences to look around, from the downfall of financial and automotive giants in the US to the urge of Indonesian government to flow fiscal stimulus. Fortunately in Bali where I life and make a living, I do not see it impacts both in my daily life as well as in the business I am in.

I may be wrong. This is a rough conclusion from what I have seen through my own eyes. And my eyes could be wrong. I fact I am very dependant to a cylindrical glass. Well, I do not want to mislead people. Quite contrary, I want to encourage people to look into things from the positive sides, at at least if it is at all negative, to find a way to turn it around.

I guess my lifestyle helps has saved me from the impact of global financial crisis. With almost everything I consume, from meals to clothing and even vehicle, is locally produced, I can afford anything I need the same way as two years ago. Few things like gadgets and computers did not bite quite an attention as I do not buying these stuffs everyday.

Running a holiday rental business I found that closing to peak holiday season coming between July and September, my salespersons are crying for supplies. Inquiries are flowing in whilst supplies are no longer exist. All villas in Bali are booked out during the period. Supply for Christmas - New Year period which is still a half year ahead starts to run out as well.

It is definitely not a picture of myself alone, I believe. My fellows in the same business confirmed similar situation. Bali tours are foreseeing similar picture. I believe the whole tourism industry in Bali is not really affected by global economic crisis. Officials announced that number of tourist visits recorded a slight increase in the first four months of 2009 compared to the same period of previous year.

Thank God that I life in Bali. It is a real paradise, I think. More than beautiful beach and sunshine along the year, it protects from the harm, even the one flow from the most powerful country.

In search of expansion beyond Bali as its initial market, Bali based holiday rental agency Private Leisure International (PLI) has started to expand its outreach toward the region by bringing villas in Phuket and Koh Samui into its portfolio. After two years it has recorded quite a significant success by gaining trusts from a handful owners of Phuket’s most luxurious holiday homes including those located in prestigious estates such as The Samsara, Ayara, and Laem Son.

To strengthen its market positioning in Phuket, the board of PLI invited the board of DwiBali to join their business trip to Phuket. Having the collaboration based on friendship, the trip was designed to combine leisure in addition to business objectives. “We are in leisure business so it makes sense to give ourselves chances to enjoy what we are offering,” said Wisna Wedhana, the Managing Partner of PLI.

The journey started from Penang, Malaysian tiny island which combines industry, European heritage, tropical beaches in a very nice package. Whilst both PLIs and DwiBalis agreed that Penang was not the right place for their business, they had all the reasons to agree that they were having a good time before hading up for a heart pumping action of F1 drivers in Malaysian Grand Prix at Sepang.

Their program in Phuket was led by PLI’s Phuket representative Chatrudee Chookeaw, a young energetic holiday property veteran who joined PLI since the first time it entered Phuket. From the picturesque Baan Talaefun where they stayed, site inspections and meetings were planned, executed, and evaluated. In addition to courtesy meetings with owners and representatives of luxury villas which have so far been happy clients of PLI, the program was also directed to acquiring newcomers into portfolio, especially low to mid end ones to fill the needs of their prospective clients.

“It is a potential market and we are keen to start joining PLI to expand our own business portfolio”, said Denny Widhana, the Director of DwiBali in their evaluation discussion in Singapore. At the end both PLI and DwiBali were looking toward a closer cooperation to strengthen market positioning in Phuket.