Hawai'i may get more travelers after Bali blast
Advertiser Staff and News Services
The weekend bombings in Bali are causing aftershocks throughout the struggling travel industry, leading travelers and tour operators to temporarily cancel trips there and forcing travel agents to find suitable alternatives in a pinch.
Associated Press
With the State Department urging Americans to leave the popular resort island, industry officials said the violence would likely strengthen travelers' desire to stay closer to home, a sentiment that gained force after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Tourists, toting their luggage with them, yesterday passed the site of Saturday night's deadly bomb blast at a Kuta Beach nightclub in Bali, Indonesia. The explosion, which killed more than 180 people, is being blamed on al-Qaida, and several tour companies are postponing planned excursions to the heavily-visited resort area.
"Most people who are making travel plans on an elective basis" — that is, anyone except business travelers — "will probably decide not to go to Bali right now," said David Buda, executive vice president at Tzell Travel Group in New York.
Instead, Buda expects to see more American travelers to exhibit "the stay-at-home syndrome," or visit Alaska, Hawai'i, Mexico and the Caribbean.
Several Hawai'i tourism experts, however, said yesterday they were uncertain what effect, if any, the Bali bombings would have on Hawai'i tourism. One reason is that the two destinations attract different types of visitors, with Bali typically appealing to younger people searching for adventure and Hawai'i primarily attracting families, honeymooners and senior citizens.
"Bali and Hawai'i are two different destinations," said Gilbert Kimura, Japan Airlines' regional sales manager in Honolulu.
Visitors from North America, who represent the single largest group of Hawai'i tourists, are in the minority in Bali. Even if they went to Hawai'i instead, their presence likely would not significantly raise Hawai'i's tourism numbers, local tourism officials said.
Japanese visitors make up the second largest group of Hawai'i tourists, based on region of origin; their presence in the Islands dropped sharply after the Sept. 11 attacks as Japanese citizens expressed fears about traveling to the United States. Many of those who did travel outside Japan chose to visit other Asian countries closer to home.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Japan Airlines' trans-Pacific travel dropped between 15 percent and 20 percent, whereas travel from Japan to Southeast Asia and China increased, according to Geoffrey Tudor, a Tokyo spokesman for the airline, which has three daily flights from Japan to Indonesia, including a direct round-trip to Bali.
Yesterday Tudor said it was "far too early" to say what effect the bombings might have on travel by the Japanese to the region and whether they might substitute Hawai'i for Bali.
"So far as we can tell up to now there's no discernible cancellation trend on our flights to Bali," he said.
David Carey, president and chief executive of Outrigger Enterprises, the parent of Outrigger Hotels & Resorts, said he believed one effect of the bombings could be that "people as a whole might have less confidence in exotic destinations."
Hawai'i, by comparison, has a far more stable political climate than many exotic locales, he said. The bombings "may cause the exotic traveler to think twice about exotic travel."
Many people appeared to be thinking twice about travel yesterday as agents around the globe were canceling upcoming trips to the Indonesian resort.
Club Med suspended travel to its Bali "village" for a week. The Coral Gables, Fla.-based company is offering to send customers to a different resort through Sunday, or will allow them to rebook their trip for sometime in the future.
All British tour operators, meanwhile, have canceled tours to Bali over the next few days and are offering penalty-free cancellations and alternative tours to affected clients. Britain's Foreign Office is warning Britons not to go to Bali at all and to avoid Indonesia except on essential business.
Thom Nulty, president of Navigant International, a corporate travel agency, said he did not expect any significant decline in business trips to Indonesia. "Because of the economy, business travel has already been cut down to essential travel," Nulty said.
The Association of British Travel Agents said leisure tourists are generally undeterred in the long run by the threat of terrorism. Despite the 1997 attack in Luxor, Egypt, the threat posed by the PKK in Turkey and the Basque separatist group Eta in Spain, tourists still traveled to those countries in large numbers, said Keith Betton, the association's head of corporate affairs.
Magnus Ranstorp, terrorism expert at St. Andrews University's Center for Terrorism and Political Violence, disagreed.
"There will be an immediate effect in terms of reluctance to travel. It is not unusual to hit tourist targets, but this is on a completely different scale," he said.
