Bali is the only commercial airport on its island and handled 23.6 million passengers in 2025, which makes it feel like a hub in the European sense. It is not one. Moving on from it usually means a flight to another hub, or a ferry, or both, and the schedules rather than the kilometres decide what fits.
Nobody agrees on the island count
The geospatial agency published 17,380 named, coordinate-verified islands for 2024, up from 17,374 in 2023 after 63 were added across four provinces. Its criteria are specific: land area, naturally formed rather than reclaimed, surrounded by water, and above water at highest tide. The agency notes the count changes annually with field verification.
The marine affairs ministry gives 17,024 as the figure formally standardised and reported to the United Nations as of 2022, and breaks it down by size: 8,892 islands under one hectare, and 16,855 of the total under 100 square kilometres. An interagency meeting in August 2021 settled on 17,000, and the 2020 gazetteer had 16,771. A companion guide sets out how far Bali diverges nationally.
The air network, counted three different ways
The civil aviation directorate's register lists 597 airports, split 36 international and 561 domestic by designation, and 562 public, 30 special-purpose and 5 special-serving-public by status. By operator, 197 are run by the directorate's own units, 188 are mission airstrips, 107 by regional governments, 52 private and 37 by the state airport company.
Ministerial decision KM 37 of 2025, announced 13 August 2025, designated 36 public airports as international, up from 17 under the previous 2024 decision. Ngurah Rai is eleventh on that list, and status is re-evaluated at least every two years.
For a traveller the more useful figures are smaller. The directorate's live traffic database covers 241 airports. In 2023 scheduled domestic service connected 128 cities, down from 145 in 2019, across 303 licensed routes operated by 13 passenger airlines.
Where the traffic sits
Summing the regulator's monthly figures for 2025, Ngurah Rai handled 23,596,482 passengers, of which 15,016,457 were international, 63.6 percent. Soekarno-Hatta in Jakarta handled 53,548,041, of which 36,071,799 were domestic.
The two airports are mirror images. Bali is a majority-international gateway with a thin domestic network; Jakarta is a majority-domestic hub. That asymmetry is why routing between two secondary Indonesian destinations so often passes through Jakarta rather than Bali, even when Bali is nearer.
National traffic in 2025 was 165,907,208 passengers, up from 162,312,323 in 2024.
The sea network is the larger one
The state passenger line operates 26 passenger ships, each carrying 500 to 3,000 people, serving 95 passenger ports and more than 300 pioneer ports, with 46 branch offices. It also states that one of its ships remains capable of rotations longer than seven days, which indicates the scale of a single voyage.
One published example gives the shape of it: a ship left Labuan Bajo on the evening of Wednesday 13 November 2024, called at Bima, and reached Benoa in Bali on the morning of Friday 15 November. That is roughly a day and a half at sea for one Flores-to-Bali leg.
The state ferry company operates more than 160 vessels on more than 300 routes across 36 ports. On the busiest Bali-Lombok link, Padangbai to Lembar, it reports 24 vessels working the route at about 13 sailings a day, rising to roughly 18 at peak, with one to two hours for loading at each call. The long-distance Java-Lombok alternative, Jangkar to Lembar, is published at approximately 15 hours of sailing. Our guide to the wet season forecast system covers that separately.
What stops a sailing, and who decides
This is the single most useful mechanism to understand, because it explains why a booked crossing can simply not happen. Authority rests with the Syahbandar, the harbourmaster, within the port authority under the sea transport directorate.
The directorate instructs harbourmasters to issue a navigation notice to masters and circulate the meteorological agency's maritime forecasts, and states that where weather endangers safety the harbourmaster is to withhold the departure approval and postpone sailing until conditions are genuinely safe. Vessels under 35 gross tonnes, tugs, landing craft and roll-on roll-off passenger ferries are singled out for that instruction.
A worked example: the Lembar to Padangbai service was suspended from 09:00 local time on Friday 7 July 2023, with the port authority citing winds of 18 to 25 knots and waves of 1 to 2.5 metres, and no fixed reopening time. The state line has stated that its larger ships can be permitted to sail through 4 to 6 metre waves but that it always defers to the port authority's notice.
The meteorological agency publishes dedicated dashboards for the Bali Strait and Lombok Strait crossings, which is where the underlying forecast comes from.
The other thing that closes the crossings
Nyepi, Bali's day of silence, stops both of the island's ferry links entirely. In 2024 Ketapang-Gilimanuk and Padangbai-Lembar closed from 05:00 on Monday 11 March to 06:00 on Tuesday 12 March, with the last Padangbai departure at 03:30 on the 11th and the first afterwards at 10:00 on the 12th. That is roughly a thirty-hour gap on the Bali-Lombok link, and it is announced months ahead by a joint religious council statement rather than by the operator. There is a companion piece on travelling in Sumatra.
What this guide does not cover
Published crossing times for Ketapang-Gilimanuk and Padangbai-Lembar are omitted: the operator's route register has an undimensioned distance column with internally inconsistent values that must not be read as minutes. No machine-readable state-line timetable could be obtained, so route durations beyond the one worked example are not given. The airport operator's own passenger figures could not be retrieved, so the 2025 numbers here are the regulator's. Garuda Indonesia's network size is not stated because its site refused retrieval. No aggregate statistic on sailings cancelled for weather exists in the sources checked. No regulation specific to Bali-Gili fast boats was located, only routine seaworthiness inspections. Fares and schedules change and are outside scope.