How many hotel rooms does Bali have? Two agencies printed three totals for 2023, and the tourism office none since

An essay of 22.01.2026 on the Bali provincial government’s own spatial-planning portal calls the island’s building moratorium an emergency policy based on data. One sentence carries the claim the island repeats: “Data BPS menunjukkan ketimpangan antara jumlah kamar hotel dan vila dengan tingkat hunian rata-rata tahunan” — BPS data shows an imbalance between the number of hotel and villa rooms and average annual occupancy. The page names no room figure, no villa figure and no BPS table.^{Source: 8}Sistem Informasi Wilayah dan Tata Ruang Bali, Pemerintah Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified We cite it for the assertion, not as data.

So we read every cell of both accommodation tables in the annual workbook of Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali. The room column has been empty since 2023, and the office says so in print.

How many hotel rooms does Bali have?

Those zeros are not unexplained. The workbook extracts the office’s annual book, STATISTIK PARIWISATA Provinsi Bali 2025, which discusses the cells we read. For 2024 and 2025, it says, room figures are zero for every type of accommodation, indicating data “belum tersedia, belum diperbarui, atau masih dalam proses pendataan sehingga tidak dapat digunakan untuk analisis lebih lanjut” — not yet available, not yet updated, or still being collected, and therefore unusable for further analysis.^{Source: 2}Pemerintah Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified

On the by-regency table the book calls the pattern “perubahan format pencatatan jumlah kamar yang sebagian besar bernilai nol”: a change in the format for recording room numbers, most of them now zero.^{Source: 2}Pemerintah Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified So the province says in print it has no usable room count for two years, while the portal above calls the policy resting on those counts data-based.

Two cautions before anything is built on the unit figures. The office counts an accommodation business, not a building, not a villa and not a room. And the counts move steeply: star hotels are recorded as 435 units in 2023, 1,297 in 2024 and 1,694 in 2025^{Source: 1}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified, in the same years the room counts fall away, while Badung shows the other side: 648 businesses holding 48,654 rooms in 2022, then 5,258 businesses in 2025 with no room figure.^{Source: 1}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified

On the cause the office is silent, and we checked. The book calls the star-hotel rise the sector’s most significant increase and gives no reason, though for a 2021 room jump in the same table it does offer one: possibly a change in data classification, or added capacity at some large hotels.^{Source: 2}Pemerintah Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified Either the counting changed or Bali nearly quadrupled its star hotels in two years, and we are not picking one on the office’s behalf.

Why does one workbook give 2023 two different room totals?

Because both figures are printed in the same file. TABEL 20 puts the 2023 provincial total at 68,594 rooms. TABEL 21, on the next sheet, puts it at 85,535.^{Source: 1}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified

The disagreement is not spread evenly. Hotel melati is identical in both tables at 32,603 rooms; star hotels are 35,394 in one and 39,335 in the other; pondok wisata is 597 in one and 13,597 in the other.^{Source: 1}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified Our own subtraction puts the gap at 16,941 rooms, 13,000 of it in that pondok wisata line and 3,941 in the star-hotel line, and each total is the exact sum of its own table’s three class rows.^{Source: 1}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Estimate

The same year also has two different business counts, 7,573 and 7,566.^{Source: 1}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified In one table the pondok wisata figure looks like the other’s with its leading digits gone — a resemblance of ours, and a reason to ask the office rather than a finding.

This is not a spreadsheet artefact either. Both totals survive into the typeset annual book: the TOTAL row of its accommodation table gives 7,573 units and 68,594 rooms for 2023, while the narrative beside its by-regency table says 2023 rose to 7,566 units with 85,535 rooms, and the book numbers those tables one higher than the workbook does.^{Source: 2}Pemerintah Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified

The tourism office is not the only agency that counted 2023. The province’s BPS office — a branch of the national statistics agency, not of the provincial government — publishes its own annual volume, TINGKAT PENGHUNIAN KAMAR AKOMODASI PROVINSI BALI 2023. It records 91,161 accommodation rooms for that year: 54,275 in star hotels, 59.54 per cent, and 36,886 in non-star hotels, 40.46 per cent. Its appendix repeats those figures and splits the star-hotel half by class.^{Source: 7}BPS Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 29/09/2026Confidence: Verified That is a third published total for one year, from a second office, agreeing with neither of the tourism office’s two.

Does any of this count villas?

No — the office confirms villas are in there and gives no way to count them. The tables carry three classes — hotel berbintang, hotel melati, pondok wisata — and a string scan of the workbook finds no cell containing vila or villa.^{Source: 1}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified Writing about the same 9,509 accommodation businesses, the book says they “mencakup hotel, vila, homestay, dan berbagai bentuk penginapan lainnya” — cover hotels, villas, homestays and other lodging. That is the only place vila appears in it, and no table publishes a vila class or figure.^{Source: 2}Pemerintah Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified A total that admits it contains villas is not a count of them.

The occupancy half of the comparison does exist, published to the month. TABEL 22 of the same workbook stores classified-hotel occupancy for 2025 as 0.6062, that is 60.62 per cent, and attributes the series to Badan Pusat Statistik Provinsi Bali, not to the tourism office.^{Source: 1}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified A separate file, 4-tingkat-hunian-kamar-2026.xls, runs to July and stores its own average row as 0.5941571428571429 for star hotels and 0.3606857142857143 for the non-star class, that is 59.42 and 36.07 per cent.^{Source: 4}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified We print what the cells hold.

That is the finding, narrowly stated: one side of the province’s comparison is published monthly and split by class, and the other has not come from the tourism office since 2023.

The case against this reading

Four arguments cut against us. The province has answered the first itself; the second we can now answer in part.

A zero is a value, not a sentence. We read those cells as a count nobody filled in, and so does the office, in the book quoted above. Our own reason is that the zeros are not confined to the empty years: in 2023 Denpasar reports 311 melati hotels and zero rooms for that class, after reporting 4,897 melati rooms in 2022.^{Source: 1}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified Three hundred and eleven hotels with no rooms between them is not a fact about Denpasar, and neither book nor file says what changed in the recording, or when a count returns.

We cannot show that no current count exists. Our verdict is about publication, not existence. The other office’s side of it is now partly answered rather than unchecked: BPS Provinsi Bali does publish a provincial room count, the third 2023 total above, on the same subject as the tables we read. What we could not establish is whether either office holds a figure for 2024 or 2025 and has not put it in these publications.

The obstacle there is ours, not a gap in the record. bali.bps.go.id and www.bps.go.id refused us with HTTP 403 on 29.09.2026 — a live site turning away a robot, not a missing page — while the download host web-api.bps.go.id served the BPS volume without complaint. A refusal to our fetcher is a fact about us, not a finding about the publisher. One trail stays behind that 403: a bali.bps.go.id table whose indexed title ends «di Provinsi Bali, 2024», which we could not open. We also did not ask either office before publication, and an answer from one of them is the likeliest place this reading turns out wrong.

The office’s two files disagree with each other on one year. TABEL 22 stores 2022 occupancy as 0.5455, that is 54.55 per cent.^{Source: 1}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified The 2026 file, same office and same measure, stores its 2022 average as 0.35320833333333335, that is 35.32 per cent.^{Source: 4}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Confidence: Verified Rounded to four decimals — our comparison, not a statement either file makes — the two series match on 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025: 0.13 against 0.130025, 0.5305 against 0.5304916666666667, 0.6223 against 0.622325, 0.6062 against 0.60615. They part only on 2022.^{Source: 4}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 27/09/2026Estimate One divergence against four agreements still cuts at us, since we quote cells from both files. We print what each file stores, and say so wherever the office prints two.

The question people actually ask is not the one we answered. Whether Bali is oversupplied compares stock against demand, and no series here measures villa stock. We have not shown the island has too many rooms or too few — only that the published tables cannot say how many there are.

One boundary: the legal instruments behind the moratorium belong to this publication’s map desk. This is about measurement, not permission.

We parsed both workbooks cell by cell as they stood on 27.09.2026 and read the annual book and the province’s essay the same day; the release posts and the BPS volume we re-checked on 29.09.2026. The occupancy file is published each month from a dated post, and the most recent on the office’s data-statistik listing is «Rilis Data Statistik Bulan Juli 2026» — dated 02.09.2026 by its heading, its page title and its structured metadata alike — which attaches the workbook at the same undated address we read. That address carries no date and no version.^{Source: 6}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 29/09/2026Confidence: Verified

The month before, the same office attached the same workbook differently: as 4-tingkat-hunian-kamar-2026-2.xls in a dated 2026/08 folder, behind a signed link that expires — and by 29.09.2026 that June page linked the July release.^{Source: 5}Dinas Pariwisata Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 29/09/2026Confidence: Verified So the copy we read is traceable to a release, and the address it sits at is reserved to none: our register records each file’s size and checksum, so a reader who downloads something else can tell.