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Confidence in rapid tourism recovery in tsunami-hit region ‘rather high’ – UN

Confidence in rapid tourism recovery in tsunami-hit region ‘rather high’ – UN

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Overall confidence in a rapid tourism recovery in Indian Ocean countries ravaged by December’s tsunami is “rather high,” the United Nations tourism agency reported today, less than two weeks after it called on the world’s media to help avoid a repeat of the slump in Asian tourism from the 2003 SARS health crisis.

“Reconstruction and revival plans in the region are being implemented at a quick pace,” World Tourism Organization (WTO) Secretary-General Francesco Frangialli said. “Some travel trade representatives expressed the expectation that demand will be back to normal or even be better than is was before the tsunami, in the 2005/06 winter season.”

At the beginning of the month Mr. Frangialli warned that saturation coverage of the tragedy could lead to an “infodemic,” as happened with the steep fall-off in travel, and subsequent adverse economic impact, in the Asia-Pacific region during the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which killed 774 people and infected more than 8,000 worldwide, the vast majority of them in China.

But unlike SARS the tsunami, although it killed more than 200,000 people and left up to five million more in need of basic services in a dozen Indian Ocean nations, did not insert a generalized uncertainty into the markets, undermining travel confidence.

“Travellers understand that the tsunami was a unique one-time event that could also have occurred in other places, for which nobody is to blame, and which is not likely to be repeated,” the report said.

The study, based on air traffic and arrival data as well as a survey among the travel trade in major source markets focusing on the four most-affected destination countries – Indonesia, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Thailand – found that charter air traffic is coming back.

Tour operations from a number of long-haul markets, which were mostly cancelled or ran at reduced capacity throughout January, gradually resumed by the end of January and during February, albeit at lower than usual capacities for this time of the year.

In other tsunami-related news, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said today it had distributed educational supplies to 240,000 primary school students over the past two and a half months in the Indonesian province of Aceh, the area worst hit by the disaster.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that it had delivered some 6,800 tents along with basic supplies to 20 locations along Aceh’s west coast and the UN International Labour Organization (ILO) is to provide vocational skills to displaced children between the ages of 15 and 17.