Southeast Asian tour agents bemoan 'lost' summer due to SARS

Southeast Asian tour agents bemoan 'lost' summer due to SARS

Peh Soo Hwee, Reuters, Singapore

Kathryn Loh has never seen such a bad crisis in her 17 years as a
travel agent. The phones in her office are silent, and some
employees are on unpaid leave.

The SARS outbreak tops off a turbulent decade for Southeast
Asia's tourism industry, which has had to weather the Asian
financial crisis of the 1990s, the Sept. 11 attacks of 2001 and
the Bali bombings last year.

"We have never faced such a critical period," said Loh,
general manager at Singapore inbound travel agency Siam Express
Pte Ltd., which mainly handles travelers from the United States,
Europe and Japan.

Travel agents say none of their woes in Asia has been as
crippling as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which has
forced airlines to cancel huge numbers of flights to the region
and driven visitor arrivals into a nosedive.

"We may lose the whole summer,"said Loh.

The northern summer period is one of the busiest times of the
year for Southeast Asia's travel industry, normally bringing
hordes of travelers to its beach resorts, tropical rain forests
and multicultural cities.

Loh said tour bookings for June had plunged 80 percent from a
year ago but added it was difficult to gauge the decline in July
and August as travelers now tend to book tours closer to their
travel dates.

"They prefer to travel within Europe or the United States."

Suparerk Soorangura, president of the Association of Thai
Travel Agents, said arrivals from Europe were expected to drop an
average of 30 percent in June on the year but is optimistic the
decline will ease by the third quarter of the year.

The months from June to August see tourists from Holland,
Italy, Portugal and Spain flocking to Thailand, where they can
easily spend double the 30,000 baht (US$701.4) an average
overseas tourist spends for an eight-day stay, Soorangura said.

"The writing's on the wall," said Pakir Singh, chief executive
of the Singapore Hotel Association, which represents
establishments that account for 90 percent of rooms in the city
state.

Singapore, which has the fourth-highest number of cases of
SARS infections, has been among the hardest hit in the region.

Visitor arrivals have plunged 67 percent in the four weeks to
April 28 with usually bustling Changi Airport -- Asia's fourth
busiest in terms of passenger traffic -- now eerily quiet.

In Indonesia, Pudjobroto, spokesman of flag carrier Garuda
Indonesia, which has regular flights to and from Amsterdam, said,
"For our European flights we still have good load factors. We
have not felt a significant impact from SARS so far."

But Deddy Sasmita, a spokesman for the Hard Rock Hotel in the
legendary resort island of Bali, where 202 people, mostly
foreigners, were killed in bombings last year, was less sanguine.

"I don't think confidence on Indonesian security conditions
among the foreigners has returned yet. I believe they also do not
want to take the risk of long haul flights, especially with this
SARS problem."

Nor have destinations like Vietnam been spared fears over the
flu-like virus, despite being declared SARS-free by the World
Health Organization.

Alfonso Romero, general manager of the five-star Melia Hotel
in Hanoi, said visitors remained wary.

"In Europe when you speak about Asia, they don't know clearly
where is Vietnam, Thailand or China, and for that I think we need
to wait at least one more month to see the positive impact of
this declaration," he said, referring to the WHO.

His hotel, like many others in Vietnam, saw occupancy plunge
from March to April. Melia was around 80 percent occupied in
March but ended April with occupancy rates of around 20 to 22
percent.

In the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, business from
foreign travelers was down by almost half, some inbound tour
operators said.

"The problem with SARS is there are more fears than facts and
that's killing us," said Anthony Wong, whose packages to Taman
Negara, a forest reserve in central Malaysia hugely popular with
Westerners, were more than half empty this time of the year.

Wong said he had cut prices by up to half to attract domestic
holiday-makers and was concentrating overseas promotions on SARS-
free destinations in Malaysia such as Sabah, a state on the
island of Borneo, known for its exotic fauna and diving spots.

"We have to rely on our own people now. We have no other
choice," Wong told Reuters.