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?

Spending a holiday in a villa is very popular. If you look hard enough, you can even find some that are more affordable than hotels with extra amenities. Many, if not all, villas will have a swimming pool and hot tub. They also have massage therapists and spa treatments available on site. Certain places will also provide you with your own butler, so you will never have to lift a finger.

After a long year of working, there is nothing better than going on a vacation. The most popular spots to visit are places where there the landscapes are beautiful and the weather is warm. That is why so many people love going on holidays to Bali. If you are going to Bali soon, you should consider bali private villas.

The island of Bali is located slightly below the equator and is an Indonesian island. This island has a very diverse culture that includes a mix of Chinese and Indian cultures. Denpasar is the capital city of this island.

The flowers, plants, and wildlife of Bali are incredibly beautiful and diverse. The island is home to many birds that cannot be spotted elsewhere and the surrounding water is full of coral reefs. However, the island does currently house an active volcano.

Staying in a bali private villa may be able to make your Bali vacation even better. Most private villas are centralized in Seminyak area, then spread wide to Umalas, Canggu to Tanah Lot; then some in Ubud, Sanur East Coast, and Jimbaran - Uluwatu South Tip of Bali Island. Try to find a place that has all of the amenities and activities you wish to partake in, while also suiting your budget.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Little different with both ceremonies above, Nyepi Day or many people known as Silent Day will be celebrate once a year. But in this year, three ceremonies above will be celebrate in two weeks. Many peoples have enthusiastic to celebrate ceremonies in this year, but we will not find Ogoh-ogoh (giant puppet) on Pengerupukan day (day before Nyepi), it caused in this period Indonesia will hold election.

Happy Galungan, Kuningan, and Nyepi Day !

Photo by Ramayadi

There are many logics explaining the cycle actually. “Everybody have just got back home from a Christmas – New Year holidays, so it just does not make any sense to expect the to come now for another holiday,” a simple explanation threw by Gede, a car rental Bali driver who had rare chance to meet his little baby back home as his schedule was completely full from early December through mid of January.

Working for a holiday rental company focusing on up market private accommodation service, Gede was exclusively assigned to families spending their holiday in Seminyak villas. “A number of different clients, but back to back stay period has completely filled up my schedule,” he continued.

With regard to the slow business in the last few weeks Gede did not show any negative expression. “It’s time for me to enjoy my earning from the peak period and spend enough time for my family,” he said. He is quite confident that there is nothing for him to worry about as the holiday rental company has started filling up his schedule starting March onward. The mid season will start as soon as the rainy season ends.

Gede is one of thousands of tour drivers in Bali, a small nut in a huge vehicle of Bali tourism industry. But I guess we have to learn from his optimism. Bali has been seeing worse situation, all of which got through peacefully and ended up in an even stronger business.

As the peak holiday season expired and the last client depart, worries started to arose. A perfect combination of low season and impact of global financial crisis came as a potential threat. “We have to be very careful in controlling our spending as we have to ensure that we have enough to run our business during the slow period,” an owner of a prominent holiday rental agency in Bali said. “We have been seeing Bali tourism survived worse situation, so there is nothing to worry about. Just business as usual,” another one expressed a more optimistic opinion.

I personally have not that much of worries. With price ranging from $500 to over $3,000 per night, target market of villa rental is wealthy business owners and investors. Crisis may force them t reallocate their portfolio or even significantly cut capitalization of their assets, but it will not affect their lifestyle. If Bill Gates lost 5 billion dollars, will he sell his private jet and fly commercial flight instead? Definitely not. There are a lot of executives and professionals are loosing their job and therefore will no longer afford to spend a holiday, but those people are in $100 - $200 resort hotels’ market range.

Nevertheless, I carefully watch the situation in my own company. It is correct that we do not have many in-house clients in January and probably February as well. But those months are in low season anyway. However bookings for the coming months do not show any evidence of financial crisis. From income point of view, January 2009 has been a good month. I believe that other agents were experiencing similar situation.

For your information, an investor named PT Anantara would like to develop any tourism spot at Buyan lake, such as adrift restaurant and adrift stage for art performance. Water at Buyan lake has getting contraction, and the investor will take benefit from that to develop some tourism spot. But some Balinese component believe that Buyan lake is one of sacred place that sacred to Balinese, and also from some research said Buyan Lake is fountain head. That’s why they prevent any exploration at Buyan Lake.

Buyan Lake is one of the biggest lake in Bali, surround by tropical forest make Buyan Lake is favorite place to have outbound activity such as trekking and camping.

We hope Bali Governor always consist to prevent any exploration at Buyan lake by investor that only take profit.

Let we keep holiness of our environment!