CATTI真题

Never mind the tsunami devastation in Asia last December, the recent earthquake in Kashmir or the suicide bombings this year in London and Bali, among other places on and off the tourist trail. The number of leisure travelers visiting tourist destinations hit by trouble has in some cases bounced back to a level higher than before disaster struck.

It is still too soon to compile year-on-year statistics for the disasters of the past 12 months, but travel industry experts say that the broad trends are already clear. Leisure travel is expected to increase by nearly 5% this year, according to the World Tourism and Travel Council.

“Tourism and travel now seem to bounce back faster and higher each time there is an event of this sort,” said, Ufi Ibrahim, vice-president of the London-based World Tourism and Travel Council. For London, where suicide bombers killed 56 and wounded 700 on July, 8, she said, “It is almost as if people who stayed away after the bomb attack then decided to come back twice.”

Early indicators show that the same holds true for other disaster-struck destinations. Statistics compiled by the Pacific Asia Travel Association, for example, show that monthly visitor arrivals in Sri Lanka, where the December 26, 2004 tsunami left more than 30,000 people dead or missing, were higher than one year earlier for every month from March through August last year.

A case commonly cited by travel professionals as an early example of the trend is Bali, where 202 people were killed in bombings targeting Western tourists in October 2002. Visitor arrivals plunged to 993,000 for the year after the bombing, but bounced back to 1.46 million in 2004, a level higher than the two years before the bombing, according to the Pacific Asia Travel Association.

Even among Australians, who suffered the worst casualties in the Bali bombings, the number of Bali-bound visitors bounced back within two years to the highest level since 1998.

Visits are also on the upswing to post-tsunami Thailand, where the giant waves killed 5,400 and left more than 5,000 missing.

Although the tsunami killed more than 500 Swedes on the Thai resort island of Phuket, the largest number of any foreign nationality to die, the Swedes are returning to the island in large numbers than last year, according to My Travel Sweden, a Stockholm-based group that sends 600,000 tourists overseas annually and claims a 28-percent market for Sweden.

“My Travel now expects a 5-percnt increase in visitors to both Thailand and Sri Lanka this season compared with the same period last year,” said Joakim Eriksson, director of communication for My Travel Sweden. “This behavior is a sharp change from the patterns of the 1990s.”

“During the first Gulf war we saw a sharp drop in travel as a whole, and the same after September 11,” Eriksson said, “Now the main impact of terrorism or disasters is a change in destination.”