News Analysis
BLANKET travel warnings this year produced a ''devastating blow'' to Thailand's tourism industry and needlessly affected thousands of innocent victims, says a leading travel and retail figure.
In a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce in Bangkok, Minor Group CEO William Heinecke said that issuing blanket travel warnings to avoid all travel to Thailand, as many countries did during the political unrest, ''was a devastating blow to Thailand's economy and, in my view, a mistake.
''This created unnecessary panic for international guests and dealt a severe blow to the entire Thai tourism industry, a sector that contributes seven percent to Thailand's GDP and employs hundreds of thousands of people.
''I feel strongly that foreign nations need to be more responsible in determining whether to implement a blanket travel warning, because the impact of doing so affects the livelihoods of millions of Thai citizens.''
Phuketwan has gone one step further and called for a united global system of alerts so all travellers are provided with timely advice. The lack of cooperation and coordination meant that during the political unrest in Bangkok, some nations considered their citizens did not need to be warned at the same time that others advised against all travel, even to Phuket and other parts of Thailand that were clearly safe.
The farcical result meant that, for example, Germans were being told it was safe to walk the streets of Phuket while people from Australia and Hong Kong were being told they were in considerable danger. In fact, all of them were always safe.
No tourists were targetted at any time in any part of Thailand. The blanket warnings were especially damaging because insurance companies declined to cover groups from those nations issuing warnings, impacting on tourist booking agents in those countries as well as in Thailand.
Yesterday Mr Heinecke said: ''I am pleased to report that most travel warnings to Thailand have now been lifted and I would like to thank all the foreign embassies for their efforts in making this happen.
''I understand and fully support the need to safeguard the interests and safety of foreign visitors to Thailand but this must be done in a responsible manner and in a way that is appropriately tailored to the situation at hand.
''I am pleased to note that neither India nor South Africa issued any travel warning during the recent red shirt demonstrations. They obviously felt their citizens were responsible enough to determine whether they should travel to Thailand and knew how to safeguard their personal safety - a refreshing approach compared to certain countries that effectively declared all of Thailand including places such as Phuket and Samui off-limits to their citizens.''
Mr Heinecke said it was of vital importance to the health of the Thai economy and Thailand's 65 million citizens that the state of affairs in Thailand ''is depicted as accurately and as responsibly as possible around the world.''
''People watching the news from their home in the US or Europe need to have a balanced understanding of events taking place in Thailand. This is where I strongly feel that the foreign diplomatic community and the media, who play a major part in framing the message, have a leading role to play.''
Phuketwan's research into the process that leads to travel alerts indicates that some embassies have a sophisticated understanding of Thailand and its politics and people.
Others take the blunt and often myopic approach that the safety of their own people overrides any commercial damage caused to Thailand (or any other country) or its innocent citizenry.
Sometimes, Phuketwan has been told, a recommendation made at an embassy in Bangkok and sent to the home country's head office (let's say for example the State Department in Washington) will be overruled.
This means that if CNN and the BBC are presenting an overly-dramatic version of events, the State Department may go with what it's seeing on television and reject the better-informed sage words of advice from its own officers.
Only rarely during the unrest did Phuketwan hear reporters or talking heads put the Bangkok violence in context by saying: ''Tourists are still arriving and departing from Phuket and other holiday destinations as normal.''
Phuketwan has also been told by sources within the Bangkok diplomatic community that reports from embassies are likely to become less realistic once the embassies themselves are forced to close, as was the case with many outposts in Bangkok in May.
The result of the confusion caused by the huge variation in individual national travel alerts is that the system is no longer believable and largely ignored by travellers - a situation that puts the citizens of all countries in greater danger.
Only a global system for all travellers, supplemented by more sophisticated email and telephone alerts for individuals, can fully restore travellers' faith in travel alerts.
As Mr Heinecke said: ''A new and better-calibrated approach to issuing travel warnings is especially timely, given the increasing frequency of civil disturbances around the world.''
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Embassies are concerned with their citizen's safety, not profit margins of those who invested in a politically unstable, 3rd world country.
Those riots could have spread like wildfire throughout the country, travel warnings were proper.
Posted by Ripley on September 17, 2010 08:22
Editor Comment:
That's a matter of opinion. There is no evidence for your comment. Tourists were never targetted. There was never any real danger to tourists: the only minor injury we're aware of to a tourist was sustained by an Australian who wasn't even aware of the protest. There was no danger of the trouble ''spreading like wildfire.'' To have tourists from one country being (falsely) told a situation is dangerous while others are told just the opposite is, I would argue, not just odd but irresponsible. Some embassy officials even admit this, privately. To have alerts placed and lifted at different times by different embassies is also crazy. A few embassies simply guard their own backsides by consciously overstating these alerts. The end result: total confusion.
By the way, there is no longer a ''third world.'' Countries these days are either developed countries or developing countries. The travel alerts are a left-over from a time when there was a ''third world,'' and when communication was difficult and international cooperation a no-no. This is the 21st century, Ripley. Let's all move into it.