Bali tourism statistics, explained.

Last updated 10 November 2026

Almost every conversation about how Bali is doing starts from the same two official figures: how many foreign visitors arrived, and how full the hotels were. Both are useful. Neither tells a restaurant, a villa manager, a surf school or a supplier what is happening in their own part of the market. This page explains where the numbers come from, what they measure, and where they stop.

Where the official numbers come from

The main source is BPS, Indonesia's national statistics agency, through its Bali provincial office. Each month BPS Bali publishes a release called the Tourism Overview of Bali Province (Perkembangan Pariwisata Provinsi Bali). It reports three headline figures:

• Foreign tourist arrivals. The number of foreign visitors who came directly to Bali in the month, with a breakdown by country of origin.
• Room occupancy at star-rated hotels. In Indonesian this is the TPK, the Tingkat Penghunian Kamar.
• Room occupancy at non-star hotels. The same measure for smaller, unclassified hotels.

To take one release as an example: the BPS Bali release for May 2025 recorded 602,213 direct foreign arrivals, star-hotel occupancy of 58.10 percent and non-star occupancy of 42.97 percent. It was published on 1 July 2025.

What the arrivals figure measures

Arrivals count people coming in. In BPS's own wording, they are foreign tourists "who came directly to Bali Province". That makes arrivals a good measure of how many visitors entered the island, and a poor measure of almost everything a business needs to plan around:

• It is a headcount, not a spend figure. A visitor who stays three nights in a guesthouse and a visitor who stays three weeks in a resort each count once.
• It says nothing about where people go. One island-wide total cannot tell Canggu from Ubud from Nusa Dua.
• It leaves out everyone already here. Residents, long-stay visitors and domestic travellers drive a large part of daily trade, and none of them appear in a foreign arrivals count.

What the occupancy figure measures

The occupancy series covers hotels: star-rated properties in one line, non-star hotels in another. It is the closest thing to an official demand measure, and it moves differently from arrivals more often than people expect.

In the same May 2025 release, star-hotel occupancy of 58.10 percent was 8 percentage points lower than the 66.10 percent recorded in May 2024. Hotels were emptier than a year earlier.

The gap became a public argument at the start of 2026. Speaking at the inauguration of the PHRI Bali board in January, the hotel and restaurant association's chairman said that foreign arrivals in 2025 had passed 7 million, up around 10 percent on the previous year, while hotel occupancy had fallen by around 8 percent, as reported by Bali Discovery. The explanation he gave was the growth of unlicensed accommodation and villa rentals marketed on digital platforms: visitors who stay outside registered hotels are not fully recorded.

Whatever the cause, the practical point is the same. A record arrivals year and a weak year for a registered hotel can be the same year.

What the official numbers leave out

• Timing. A month's figures are published about a month after it ends. By the time you read May's numbers, July has started.
• Everything outside hotels. Villas, restaurants, beach clubs, retail, wellness, activities, transport, property and suppliers have no official monthly series of their own.
• Spend. Neither headline figure says how much visitors spent, or on what.
• Area and segment. Province-wide averages hide the difference between a full street and an empty one.
• Your position. No public number tells an operator whether a slow month was the market or just them.

How to read the monthly release

1. Compare with the same month last year, not last month. Bali is seasonal, so month-on-month changes mostly show the calendar.
2. Read arrivals and occupancy together. When they move in opposite directions, something about where people stay, or how long, has changed.
3. Check the date on the release. Figures quoted in news articles are often one or two months old on the day they are published.
4. Treat it as the wide shot. It tells you about the island. It does not tell you about your sector or your area.

Where River Data fits

River Data does not replace the official statistics. It fills the space underneath them. Businesses across Bali contribute their own operating figures, such as sales, bookings, enquiries or foot traffic. Those figures are anonymised and aggregated, and each contributor gets back the market's version of the data they share, with their own numbers benchmarked privately against their peer group.

We are in our founding period and are not publishing market figures yet. When we do, every number will be an aggregate, and this page will link to it. Read how the method works, or join as a founding contributor.

Sources

• BPS Bali, Tourism Overview in Bali Province, May 2025 (published 1 July 2025)
• Bali Discovery, "Anomalies in Bali Tourism: Arrivals Increase as Occupancies Plummet" (29 January 2026)