Asia crosses fingers against bird flu tourism hit

Asia crosses fingers against bird flu tourism hit

Dominic Whiting Reuters Vientiane

Senior Asian tourism officials, scared a bird flu epidemic sweeping the region will hit an industry that employs millions, sought on Tuesday to lure more holiday-makers by promising discounts and safety from the virus.

Meeting in Laos, lodged between bird flu-stricken Thailand, Vietnam and China, they played down the threat of the disease to humans and talked up the tourism industry's recovery from a SARS epidemic last year.

But fear lingered that the strain of avian influenza, which has resulted in the slaughter of millions of chickens, could mix with a human virus and mutate into a deadly form that spreads between people.

"The situation is changing rapidly, so we're watching carefully," Lim Neo Chian, chief executive of the Singapore Tourism Board, told Reuters. "We're keeping our fingers crossed."

The World Health Organization said this week two sisters in Vietnam may have contracted the virus from their brother, who had come into contact with chicken during preparations for his wedding. If so, this would be the first recorded case of human-to-human transmission during the outbreak.

Vietnam's Vice Minister for Tourism, Pham Tu, said he regretted 1,000 Japanese tourists had cancelled their trips because they feared bird flu, but said visitor arrivals in January had jumped 17 percent from the previous year.

Vietnam's communist government is keeping tourists away from affected areas and even chicken meals, even though experts say meat is safe if cooked well.

"We would like to send a message to Japanese tourists that there's no evidence of human-to-human transmission in Vietnam. I still eat chicken, but to react to the concerns of tourists, we've taken it off their menus," Pham said as he headed for lunch.

After a meal of crab mousse, wild mushroom soup and fried fish, the ministers from Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea and China were to talk about joint marketing campaigns, mutually abandoning visas and a US$399 three-city air pass with hotel discounts.

Japan's vice minister responsible for tourism, Hayao Hora, said he expected more Japanese to travel abroad this year because fear of bird flu was far less than fear of SARS and terrorist attacks in 2003.

"The cases of bird flu have not affected tourism so far," Hora told Reuters. "Outbound travel fell 20 percent last year, but I think we'll be back to normal levels this year."

Some 16 million Japanese traveled abroad in 2003, with 1.2 million visiting Thailand and 2.2 million holidaying in either Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines or Singapore.

But some officials thought bird flu would have some impact on travel.

"I'm expecting that maybe bird flu will cause the number of tourists coming to Asia to decline a bit," said South Korean vice minister for tourism, Shin Hyun Taek. He said SARS caused Korean tourist arrivals to fall 10 percent last year from 5.35 million.

But promoting intra-regional tourism offered hope.

Laos, where per capita income is around $400, opened a brand new $75 million exhibition center on the edge of its dusty capital on Tuesday to host a week-long tourism fair for the 10- member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

"In the region we have 550 million people who know ASEAN well," said Lim. "Even if there are small trouble spots here and there they will travel, which isn't necessarily the case if you're living far away, say in Europe."