City Travel Agents Scramble in Wake Of Deadly Tsunami
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Pallavi Shah was at home, recovering from Christmas, when a colleague phoned from India and broke the news about the tsunami that killed tens of thousands of people along the coast of the Indian Ocean.
Ms. Shah, a travel agent at Our Personal Guest, flipped on the television, learned more about the natural disaster, and immediately started trying to reach out to clients who were visiting the affected areas. She managed to communicate with each one, and from New York she made sure that a family of four on vacation at the Maldive Islands made it home safely.
“Sri Lanka was just beginning to get onto the radar screen of Americans,” she said. “It’s very popular, very chic. The Maldives, Phuket … it’s going to be anybody’s guess about how long it’s going to take them to dig out of this and rebuild.” Phuket is a Thai getaway.
Ms. Shah’s scramble to find out what resorts were destroyed by the tidal waves, and to help clients escape and change travel plans, is being repeated this week at travel agencies across New York City.
Tariq Mahboob of World Travel said about 50% of his clients who were scheduled to visit relatives in India and Bangladesh in the beginning of 2005 have called to cancel. He also had to cancel a trip for a family of three who planned to leave this weekend for Columbo in Sri Lanka. Since the earthquake, he said, 10% of his calls have been from New Yorkers who want to postpone or cancel their vacations.
Kimberly Wilson Wetty of Valerie Wilson Travel said one of her clients was supposed to leave this weekend for Phuket, but the hotel e-mailed as soon as the tsunami hit and said it couldn’t accommodate travelers.
Despite the huge human and economic toll of the tsunami, she said, the disaster probably wouldn’t hurt tourism as much as the SARS epidemic did in 2003.
“Most people would still continue to travel and chalk this up to Mother Nature,” Ms. Wetty said. “This was a very unfortunate tragedy, but SARS was far more devastating to that part of the world. There, you had a realistic fear of getting sick, versus Mother Nature having something tragic happen that you can’t control.”
The president of the luxury tour operator Absolute Asia, Ken Fish, also said SARS, in the long run, would prove more devastating to tourism than would the tsunami. He also said travelers should study the geography of the region before they start canceling travel plans.
“It certainly doesn’t affect the entire continent or all of India or all of Asia,” Mr. Fish said. “If there is a hurricane in the Caribbean, New York is not affected.”
Although most travel agents are fielding calls from worried travelers, some are being forced to temper the travel dreams of their clients.
STA Travel’s David Rivera said he met with a client yesterday who wanted to visit the coast of Thailand.
“I asked him, ‘Have you been watching the news?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m from Israel. I’m not scared of nothing,'” Mr. Rivera said. Despite his client’s bold travel ideas, the agent said, the man didn’t book anything.
Mr. Rivera said it would be months before it’s clear how long it will take to repair tourist spots.
“People aren’t estimating damages yet,” he said. “They’re just estimating lives. The damage estimations haven’t really started yet. Right now, people are just worried about getting food and water over there.”