It’s summer blockbuster movie season, with action-packed sequels and prequels hitting the big screen. Maybe I’m just getting old, but whenever I leave the theater after seeing one of those movies, I always seem to be thinking to myself “I feel like I’ve seen that before.” More often than not, sequels and prequels are the same style of action scenes designed to catch your attention in trailers, and to encourage you to avoid focusing on the normally weak plot.
In travel, this summer’s most unwelcome sequel is the dreaded Swine Flu, aka SARS Part 2.
You remember SARS, don’t you? It was the summer of 2003 and we were all just finally starting to recover from post-9/11 hysteria, and then SARS hit and we were all going to die. It was inevitable, especially if you went to (gasp!) China.
I was working for Airtreks at the time, and it was interesting seeing the shift in travel patterns before and after that. Immediately following 9/11, people didn’t want to go to the Middle East, and didn’t want to fly on Middle Eastern airlines. I always found that ironic because Middle Eastern airlines are clearly not the primary target of radical Middle Eastern terrorists – American and European carriers are. And the hype about safety in those destinations was absurd. Even before 9/11, most Americans who had traveled through the Islamic world would’ve told you that the people are not only especially friendly, but often even friendlier when they find out you’re American.
I visited Morocco and Turkey in October-November, 2001. Although I was inevitably asked about outrageous conspiracty theories, overall I was treated even better than my fellow European travelers, and received an even warmer welcome when I told them that I was also Jewish. People in the Islamic world place a high value on hospitality, and are genuinely honored that you’ve chosen to visit their country. If anything, they’re excited to see that we don’t hate them (which is what their media often tells them), and are eager to see that we don’t hate them either.
Regardless, the media told us that the Islamic world was unsafe. And Europe was too, because there are lots of Muslims there, or Muslims who can get there, and everybody knows that all the Muslims want to kill us, so don’t put yourself in the line of fire. Or something like that.
What I saw at the time was a huge increase in demand to areas the people deemed safe, which were not coincidentally areas where there aren’t large Islamic populations; East Asia, Latin America and the South Pacific.
East Asia, notably China and Vietnam, seemed especially popular. When talking to clients, many of them commented that they viewed those countries as being “safe” travel destinations. They’re both also Communist countries where freedom of expression is limited…and oddly enough that seemed to actually appeal to people, whether they openly admitted it or not. There was just a general consensus that nobody was going to step out of line there, because we all saw what happened during the Beijing student uprisings in 1989. For the first, and probably last time ever, the memories of Tiannamen Square arguably helped boost tourism to China.
And then in 2003 SARS hit, and everything want to hell.
Leisure and business travelers cancelled their travel plans to China (and the rest of Asia) in droves. There were a few isolated cases of SARS in Toronto, and I had customers who demanded refunds on their Air Canada tickets to Europe. In the end media acknowledged that things may have been blown out of porportion, but I’m not blaming the media.
I blame ourselves. We often label “the media” as a single entity, rather than a group of individuual actors, who at the end of the day are tasked with telling people what they want to hear. For whatever reason, we all seem to thrive on hysteria and the need for “news” 24 hours/day. Vice-President Joe Biden certainly didn’t help the situation when he told us all to stay off planes, even if he attempted to soften those remarks later.
Luckily, media coverage this week seems to be focused more on a them of “Maybe we all overreacted just a wee bit about this,” whereas last week’s coverage was along the lines off “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!” Even on blogs and social networking sites, people appear to be discussing the issue a lot more rationally than they were last week. If anything, the Swine Flu backlash has begun.
When the media overreacts, governments overreact. Last week Israel declared that what we now call H1N1 be called the “Mexico Flu” because “Swine Flu” is unkosher. After realizing the damage this caused with the diplomatic relations to Mexico, they later recanted.
In neighboring Egypt, authorities responded by ordering the slaughter of all pigs in the country, despite the fact that the virus is transmitted through humans, not pigs. That’s disturbing because it was noteworthy that Egypt, a country with a 90% Muslim population, the majority of whom don’t eat pork for religious reasons, even allowed pork to be sold (let alone raised) in the country in the first place. Even moderate Arab countries such as the Gulf states strictly forbid that, but in Egypt it was tolerated amongst the country’s 10% Christian population. Many of those Christians now (understandably) view the slaughter as religious persecution. So we can even blame media hype (which is again, our own fault) for fostering further religious tensions in the Middle East. Nice job, everybody.
Obviously nowhere has been more devestated by this hysteria than Mexico, the world’s 8th most popular tourism destination, and a country where tourism is their 3rd biggest industry. That industry had already been suffering from high fuel prices (and thus high airfares) for most of 2008, as well as the economic crisis (and subsequent drop in leisure travel) last fall and in to this year. And if that wasn’t enough, most of 2009 had seen overblown media coverage of drug war violence in Mexico’s border towns such as Juarez and Tijuana, US State Department warnings about travel to Mexico, and spring breakers being told to alter their plans to visit Cancun.
I’ll never understand why gang violence in border towns and big cities would scare people away from resort destinations such as Cancun and Puerto Vallarta (where there have been no notable drug war incidents to my knowledge). To me that would’ve been the equivalent to cancelling your trip to San Francisco or San Diego after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992. Even after the riots in Paris and other European cities in November 2005, I don’t think that there was nearly an uproar about deferring travel to those destinations.
I won’t go as far as to blame racism for media coverage and public perception about Mexico now and China during SARS, but I do feel that it’s at least somewhat present. Perhaps Westerners are just more comfortable and understanding of Western destinations such as Los Angeles and Paris, and maybe they’re just scared of what’s unfamiliar. However, there’s a fine line between fear and hysteria, and hysteria is irresponsible and dangerous.
Unfortunately I think that 2009 is going to be a bad year for travel to Mexico, at least in the short term. Kayak was kind enough to post some interesting stats on their blog showing that flight searches to Mexico were down by as much as 47% in some markets.
A few colleagues of mine attended the Tianguis Turistico conference in Acapulco last week, the largest tourism event in Latin America. As if the existing media coverage about the drug war wasn’t bad enough, Swine Flu hit just before the conference. And to rub salt in the wound, a 5.6 earthquake hit Acapulco just as the conference was beginning. From what I’m told, most Americans at the conference couldn’t wait to get out of there, with some stuck for days because flights out of Acapulco were completely full.
But it’s not all bad news, as this excellent San Francisco Chronicle article reports. For starters, Swine Flu hysteria has replaced drug war hysteria in the media. Eventually we’ll all forget about this, and Mexico’s tourism sector will fully recover. Unfortunately we don’t know how long that will take, and a lot of hard-working in Mexico (as well as tourism professionals in the US and other countries who make a living off of Mexican tourism) are going to needless suffer as a result.
In the meantime, enjoy this video from 1976:
