Bali Fully Booked For Christmas and New Year's Holidays

Editor's Note:

As I have been predicting for months Bali is fully booked for the Christmas and New Year's Holidays.

My first clue that this would happen was when our © Bali Luxury Villas were booked a solid three months in advance for the holidays.

There are going to be a lot of disappointed travelers this season especially those in places such as Jakarta, Singapore and Hong Kong who expect to make normal last-minute arrangements for Bali.

First they will be very fortunate if they obtain a flight and secondly they will be shocked by much higher prices than last year.

Along with these record tourist arrivals I also predict a record amount of real estate sales and substantially higher prices for high demand properties such as luxury villas.

There will be especially rapid increases on beachfront properties. in particular the ones that are still affordable in southern Bali such as our Paradise Beach Estates starting as little as $159,000.

So give the gift that keeps on giving buy or lease a Bali property and get in what I expect to be the largest increase in Bali real estate prices the shortest time period in history

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Made Arya Kencana | December 12, 2010

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/bali-fully-booked-for-christmas-and-new-years-holidays/411340

Denpasar. Hotels in Bali are fully booked for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, the head of the island’s hotel association said on Sunday, while police said there had been no indication of an increased threat of terrorist attack.

“From December 20 onward, hotel rooms in Bali are fully booked,” said Perry Markus, head of the Bali branch of the Indonesian Hotel and Restaurant Association. He added that this was a marked improvement over last year’s numbers, when occupancy averaged 70 percent during the holidays.

Addressing security concerns, Bali Police Chief Insp. Gen. Hadiatmoko said on Sunday that 12,000 personnel would be deployed to secure the island throughout the Christmas and New Year’s celebrations.

“Although there is no indication of a possible terrorist attack, we will remain vigilant,” he said.

Two major terrorist attacks have damaged Bali’s reputation as a tourist paradise in the last decade. Suicide bombings in Kuta in October 2002 killed 202 people, many of them foreign nationals.

In October 2005, three coordinated bomb blasts in Jimbaran and Kuta killed 26 people and injured more than 100.

“I can say that security conditions in Bali at this time are under control,” Hadiatmoko said.

He pointed out that his officers had solved the high-profile murder of a teenage student in Denpasar last month and the recent theft of sacred Hindu statues known as pratima .

But Brig. Gen. Surya Dharma, a former chief of the National Police’s elite Densus 88 counterterrorism unit, said separately that the recent success in apprehending suspected terrorists in Aceh and Medan did not mean the police should let down their guard.

Police on Friday arrested Abu Tholut in Central Java. He had been one of the country’s most wanted suspected terrorists.