#BoycottBali just a hashtag?

While outraged Australians take to social media to announce travel cancellations and vows to never travel to Indonesia, Webjet and Qantas say they have not seen any change in demand for flights to the country.

The AFR reports Webjet announcing flights to Bali had increased by 42% over the last four weeks compared year on year during the same period, and Qantas ceo Alan Joyce saying the airline had not seen any evidence of customers boycotting Indonesia.

“It’s a personal decision what people decide to do and how people accept their views. Some people are obviously annoyed at the [Indonesian] government’s decisions. [But] there are a lot of people that are not upset with the people of Indonesia,” Joyce said at a National Press Club luncheon in Canberra yesterday, the paper reports.

Joyce told the paper Qantas would be closely monitoring whether demand for Jetstar flights would take a dip over the coming weeks.

“But at the moment there are no signs of any impact and our expectation is there probably won’t be a significant impact on those operations,” he said.

Bali bookings are the most popular international destination for customers of Webjet and its chief executive, John Gusic told the paper there is usually little tie between bookings and political situations amongst Aussie travellers.

“Whenever there has been a political event historically, if there is a period of suppressed bookings, it picks up very quickly and reverts to the underlying performance of the market,” Gusic said to AFR.

“In this case, there has been significant publicity about the fate of the Bali 9 and it hasn’t impacted bookings to Bali over that period.”

However, vocal Australians seemingly have been lashing out against Indonesia on social media using the hashtag #BoycottBali, with one tweeting “Australians will never forget this. You’re dead to us, Indonesia,” @timfrench.

“That’s $10K of my hard-earned the Indonesians won’t be getting,” said another on Twitter.

Meanwhile, those against the boycott campaign said changing holiday plans would do nothing but simply hurt local communities who rely heavily on tourism dollars.

“People who are all #BoycottBali yet have holidays booked to Thailand. Pretty sure they do the same thing there too,” Kirsty McConnell said, AAP reported.

Following the executions, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he will recall the country’s ambassador, Paul Grigson, from Jakarta, but New Zealand’s Prime Minister, John Key was reported as saying it is “unlikely” the country would take similar steps of withdrawing its ambassador.

“Everybody understands our position that we’re deeply opposed to the death penalty in any country, but ultimately there were no New Zealanders involved here,” Key said, AAP reports.

“We don’t withdraw our ambassadors in lots of countries where there are executions of other countries’ nationals.”

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Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

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