"As the change of the Lunar Year approaches, this is a momentum for us to work on Chinese tourists amid this month's lack of tourist arrivals," Asita Bali chairman Ketut Ardana said in Denpasar on Wednesday, January 27.

In previous Lunar Year seasons, Ardana said, the number of tourists from China usually jumps to an average of 20 percent, a significant figure.

Chinese tourists, he said, tend to stay long in Bali; for an average of five days and four nights.

The potential for a tourist surge from China is supported by the many number of direct flights to Denpasar from China's large cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzou by local and international airlines.

In 2015, around 200 million people from China traveled overseas, but less than a million visited Bali.

Ardana hopes that both the government and tourism businesses would make efforts to increase the number of tourist visits from China.

According to Bali's Central Statistics Agency (BPS), 642,000 people from China visited Bali from January to November 2015, a 19-percent year-on-year increase. The figure accounted for 17.68 percent of the total number of foreign tourists visiting Bali in the period.

ANTARA