Northstar

www.travelweekly-asia.com 22 | ITB ASIA OFFICIAL DAILIES focus ///Tour Operators GETTING TOURISTS BACK AFTER DISASTERS Earthquake devastation in Japan. Natural disasters, are unpredictable. They can strike anywhere, anytime and leave destinations in shock as tourists turn away from trouble spots. But there is a way to limit the damage. The ideal strategy is storytelling and education, according to tour operators. It's a reality the travel industry knows all too well: Suddenly and without warning, a natural disaster, political crisis, violence or a disease upends tourism in a destination that had been selling well. And just like that, travel takes a nosedive. Tour operators, packagers, cruise lines and travel sellers often have something of a workaround plan in place, a way to salvage at least some of their business when a destination goes bust. Mainly, it just amounts to sending their clients elsewhere. But for the destinations, there is nowhere to run when disaster strikes. They are often left picking up the pieces of a tourism economy that swung from extremely lucrative one day to barely a trickle the next. "Many tour operators, [and] especially cruise lines, will just move to another destination, which can economically crucify [the damaged] destination," said Rachel Dodds, owner of the Sustaining Tourism consulting firm and a professor at the Ted Rogers School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Ryerson University in Toronto. "Currently, I am unaware of any international standard that protects destinations." After the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, for example, "Thailand, a country which is very dependent on tourism, faced a massive decline, which crippled many businesses," she said. "Responsible tourism practices and corporate responsibility of companies do help to counter this, but there is no standard, and the travel industry does not have a good track record in this regard." Most recently, the industry has witnessed how France in particular and Europe in general were impacted in the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks in Paris, Belgium and Nice. It has also watched nervously as Latin America was forced to combat concerns about the mosquito-borne Zika virus in order to minimise the impact on much-needed tourism flows there. Prior to the political upheaval in Egypt, sites such as the Temple of Karnak overflowed with tourists; foreign tourism dropped from a peak of 14 million in 2010 to under 10 million last year. With an eye toward longer-term investment and involvement in certain destinations, there appears to be signs of increased awareness and action from travel suppliers to create and support plans to help destinations weather the inevitable travel storms. Following the devastating earthquake in Nepal in April 2015, the travel industry rallied to raise funds for and provide aid to the country. Efforts to stimulate a recovery, albeit a slow one, continue there. In Mexico, the Mexico Tourism Board, regional destination marketing organisations, tour operators and local suppliers have become allies in times of crisis, showcasing ways they have found to aggressively overcome challenges at a rapid pace and welcome tourists back to the destination. Having experienced a series of setbacks that continue to tarnish its image as a vacation destination, Egypt still hasn't fully recovered; its international tourist arrivals were still below 10 million last year. And according to Ashish Sanghrajka, president of Big Five Tours & Expeditions, the industry's lack of a coordinated recovery effort in Egypt bears part of the blame. "It's been the race to the bottom. When a country goes into a downward spiral, every company, big and small, [should] form a task force, [even if we are] competing companies. It doesn't matter. We put A stupa in Khumjung damaged during the Nepal earthquake. PHOTO CREDIT: YANKANE/ISTOCK PHOTO CREDIT: PERRETEN/ISTOCK all of it aside. The onus of doing it is on us." Sanghrajka explained that the problem in Egypt, and often in other destinations that experience setbacks, is that a lack of commitment to the destination and to maintaining higher standards of product can lead to extreme discounting and an undermining of the overall quality of the product. "It takes five years to mathematically recover a 10% cut in prices," Sanghrajka said. "Once you start discounting, your client changes, and most importantly, so does your competition, usually not for the better." When destinations begin to recover from a crisis, he said, "the hardest challenge is getting pricing back to parity. If you have discounted, you now have to find a way to get out of that game." "Our industry is so unpredictable, yet we sometimes get into this naive mode of 'what goes up keeps going up'," Sanghrajka said. "If you grow 30% in a rebound year, don't base your strategy on continuing that growth curve. The faster the peak, the faster the fall." By Michelle Baran

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