They’re asking who these new guests were and we told them: Russians. We did tell our owners and we updated them regularly. Basically, that’s what kept us alive out there: Reduction in our services. There was no way we could survive, offering the same level of service that we offered, before COVID hit. All of our costs were minimized, which was important because we’re only bringing in 20% of the revenue that we’re bringing in pre-COVID. So, but once we had the guests in, it was much easier because then we cut down our services, we cleaned twice a week, for instance. It was a lot of work because everyone wants to see the villa first, unlike normal holiday rentals where you are in another country. That’d be a lot of haggling and negotiation. Every time we needed to rent a villa, to renew a lease, and get new guests, we’d have to do up to 20 visits. We had a big pool of people on the island. The Facebook marketing groups for Bali villas have 30,000 or 40,000 members. How did you pivot your property management business? What did you have to do in terms of marketing channels, operations, service levels, amenities? And what did you tell to owners who had preconceived ideas against Russian, and now Indonesian travelers?Īirbnb and were useless in that kind of circumstance. We started doing that in March and basically from April 2020, recorded almost 100% occupancy the whole way through, right up to now. So we started renting everything out monthly.
Basically, our clientele became our clientele of monthly guests. It was thousands of people came over and it was a big industry bringing people over, basically with the attraction that you could come and live in Bali and pay about $550 US a month for a beautiful two-bedroom villa with a swimming pool and regular cleaning. We got a whole lot of people coming over, basically fleeing the conditions in Russia, largely Russia, on these other visas. Different forms of visas that were valid for between three months to four months. So, but what was open were longer-term visas, so-called Business Visas and Social Visas. The tourist visas have never been reopened since. We lost tourists completely, and we’ve never regained them. Most of our bookings still came over, but then in March 2020, all the tourist visas were suspended into Indonesia. We were basically were okay until February 2010.