Shared anonymized data, shared visibility.
The island's economy, in numbers.
Official arrivals figures tell one story. Your sales tell another. River Data pools anonymised operating data from businesses across Bali, from hotels and restaurants to retail, property, clinics and suppliers, and gives every contributor the true picture of the island's economy. Free, for as long as you contribute.
Founding period open now. Contributors only. No raw data is ever shared.
Everyone can feel the market moving. Nobody can see it.
The official data is late and loose
Arrival statistics arrive months after the fact, get revised quietly, and count passports at the airport, not guests in beds, covers on tables or sales at the till.
Arrivals are not spending
A record arrivals month can sit alongside empty villas, quiet restaurants and slow shops. Headcounts say nothing about length of stay, spend, or where the money actually goes once it is on the island.
Every operator is guessing alone
Each business sees its own occupancy or takings and wonders if it is the market or just them. Without a shared baseline there is no way to tell.
Want the detail? Read where Bali's official tourism numbers come from, and what they miss.
Why "River"
Many streams. One river.
Bali's rivers begin as hundreds of small streams in the hills. No single one carries much. Joined, they feed every terrace on the island, and for a thousand years the subak cooperatives have shared that flow so no farmer irrigates alone.
River Data works the same way. Each business contributes a small stream of operating data. We combine it, anonymise it, and return it as a clear view of the whole market. The more who join, the stronger the flow for everyone.
How it works
Three steps. One report a month.
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01
You contribute
Once a month, send us whatever your business already records. Sales, bookings, financials, inbound WhatsApp enquiries, foot traffic: if you track it, we can use it. Any format works, from a system export to a spreadsheet or a screenshot. We clean it up and handle the rest. Prefer not to send anything by hand? We are happy to do the work of connecting to your systems directly, so the data flows on its own. Either way it takes minutes, not a project.
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02
We anonymise and aggregate
Business identifiers are stripped on arrival. Figures are only ever published as group totals and indices, with a minimum number of contributors behind every number. No single business is ever visible, including to us in the published output.
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03
You get back what you give
Your monthly River Report mirrors what you contribute. Share occupancy and you see the market's occupancy. Share sales and you see the market's spend. Share only your inbound WhatsApp enquiries and that is the picture you get back. Whatever you send, you see the market's version of it, with your own figures benchmarked privately against your peer group. The more you share, the more you see.
What to contribute
Any signal that tells us how the island is doing.
There is no fixed list. If a number in your business moves when Bali's economy moves, it is useful. Here are the types of data we would love to see.
Sales and POS
Till and receipt exports. Covers, tickets, items sold, average spend, by hour and by day. Card versus cash and the split of local to foreign cards.
Bookings and occupancy
PMS and reservation exports. Rooms and nights sold, lead times, length of stay, cancellations, forward bookings, source markets and channels.
Enquiries and leads
Inbound call volumes, website and form enquiries, WhatsApp and Instagram messages, quote requests, viewings booked. A weekly count is enough.
Financials
Monthly revenue, payroll headcount, rent, supplier spend, debtor days, cash position. Totals and trends, never line items or names.
WhatsApp and community groups
Exports from groups you run or admin: how often villas, rooms, scooters, jobs and services are posted, asking prices, how fast listings are filled. Names and numbers are stripped before anything is read.
Property and rentals
Asking and achieved rents, vacancy, days to let, land and villa prices, construction starts, long-stay versus short-stay demand.
Operations and supply
Deliveries made, trips driven, loads moved, stock turns, staff rostered versus needed, utilities consumed. The pulse of the businesses that keep the others running.
Footfall and traffic
Door counters, parking tickets, website visits, app opens, class and tour attendance, airport and ferry pickups.
Anything else
Scooter rentals, visa agent volumes, school enrolments, clinic appointments, gym sign-ups, boat crossings. If you watch it to judge how business is going, we want to see it too.
Any format
A CSV, a PDF, a screenshot, a photo of the day sheet. We do the cleaning and build the template around what you already produce.
Any size
One shop or forty venues. A single weekly count still moves the index. The more varied the sources, the truer the picture.
Anonymised on arrival
Business, customer and staff identifiers are removed before anything is analysed. Only group totals and indices are ever published. How we protect it.
The report
What contributors see.
One clear monthly read on the market, written for owners and GMs, not statisticians. Charts you can act on, and your own position against your peers.
Demand
- Occupancy, footfall and order volume, by area and sector
- Booking lead time and length of stay, where they apply
- Cancellation and no-show rates
- Customer mix as it shifts: visitors, expats, locals, source markets
Spend
- Spend per head and average ticket, by sector
- Day-visitor volume at venues and attractions
- Weekday and weekend split
- Month-on-month and year-on-year momentum
Benchmark
- Your numbers against your peer group, privately
- Where you are gaining or losing share
- Early warning when the market turns
Outlook
- Forward bookings and order pipelines, aggregated
- Events, holidays and flight capacity in context
- A plain-English read on what it means
The exact metrics follow what contributors can share. The founding group decides what goes in first.
Who it's for
Any business that lives on the island.
- Hotels and resorts
- Villas and property management
- Beach clubs and venues
- Restaurants, bars and cafes
- Wellness, spa and fitness
- Surf, dive and activities
- Transport and logistics
- Retail and e-commerce
- Real estate and construction
- Coworking and education
- Healthcare and clinics
- Agencies and professional services
- Farms, producers and suppliers
Trust
Your data is the asset. We treat it that way.
Never identifiable
Every published figure is an aggregate with a minimum group size. If a segment is too small to hide its members, it is not published.
Never sold raw
Your submissions are used only to build aggregated reports. Raw data is not shared with other contributors, partners, or anyone else. Ever.
Business metrics only
We collect operating figures, not customer records. No names, no passports, no personal data, which keeps you and us on the right side of Indonesia's Personal Data Protection Law.
Written agreement
Every contributor signs a short data agreement that sets out what we collect, how it is used, and what we will never do with it.
Leave anytime
Stop contributing whenever you like. Your historical submissions can be deleted on request.
Independent
River Data is not owned by any hotel group, booking platform, developer or government body. It exists to serve contributors.
The full detail is on the method page: what we collect, how it is anonymised, and what you get back.
- 20+
- years working with large data sets
- Facebook & Meta
- where the numbers were measured in billions of people
- A lifetime
- on the island his entire life
- United Founders
- member of the founder community
The founder
Built by someone who has spent a career making big numbers tell the truth.
River Data is run by a founder with more than twenty years in large-scale data, including years at Facebook and Meta, where a dataset meant billions of people and getting it wrong was not an option. The disciplines behind the River Report, anonymisation, minimum group sizes and careful aggregation, are the same ones, applied to a market that has never had them.
The connection to Bali is older than the career. He has been on the island his entire life and lives here now. This is not an outside analytics firm testing a market. It is a resident who wants the island's businesses to see clearly.
Founding period
Contribute data. Get the report. That's the deal.
During the founding period the report is free to every business that contributes. Later it will be sold to those who don't. Founding contributors also shape what gets measured first.
Every farmer on the river gets water. Every business that contributes gets the report.
Create your contributor account
Takes two minutes. Tell us who you are and which business you run. We review founding applications within a few days and unlock the template and the agreement in your account.
- Free monthly River Report, for as long as you contribute
- Private benchmark against your peer group
- A say in what gets measured first
Already a contributor? Log in.
FAQ
Questions people ask first.
What exactly do I have to send?
A monthly export with the fields you are comfortable sharing: occupancy or room nights, covers or transactions, average ticket, revenue index, booking dates, customer mix. We give you a template built for your sector. Partial data is still useful; send what you have.
Can competitors see my numbers?
No. Nobody sees individual submissions. Published figures are group aggregates with a minimum number of contributors behind each one. Your private benchmark shows you against your peer group, never the other way round.
Do I need to share revenue?
Not in absolute terms. Many contributors share indices (this month versus a base month) or rate and volume figures rather than totals. Both work for the report.
Is it really free?
For contributors, during the founding period, yes. The report has value and later we will sell it to businesses that do not contribute. Contributing is how you earn it.
How is the data stored?
Encrypted in transit and at rest, with business identifiers separated from the figures on arrival. Access is limited to the small team that builds the report.
Who is behind this?
River Data is an independent initiative based in Bali, open to every kind of island business. The founder spent more than twenty years working with large data sets, including years at Facebook and Meta, and has been on the island his entire life. We are not affiliated with any hotel group, OTA or government body.