According to the World Tourism Organization, despite the success in developing their recreational resources, the share of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Maldives and Indonesia in the total number of tourist trips worldwide is only 3%. In other countries, such as Malaysia, the areas affected by the tsunami are not significant for tourism.
The WTO hopes that the overall economic recovery in the Asia-Pacific region will not allow the growth of tsunami-affected countries to stall. According to the International Monetary Fund, last year China's GDP growth was about 9%, Australia's 3.6%, South Korea's 8.8%. It should be noted that intra-regional tourism accounts for 79% of all tourist trips in this region of the world.
At the same time, as the WTO notes, the tsunami affected only some resorts on the coast of the most affected countries. In Thailand, the world-famous island of Phuket suffered the greatest damage. However, the country's tourism industry is by no means limited to this resort – one need only recall Pattaya or Chiang Mai. In Indonesia, the natural disaster hit Sumatra, which can hardly be called the country's tourist center. Bali, however, is more of a tourist center, where no tsunami was observed at all.
The same can be said for Sri Lanka, whose main tourist centers are concentrated on the western coast, which was not affected by the disaster. In the Maldives, according to the WTO, only a third of the resorts were seriously damaged. Thus, according to WTO experts, the tsunami was able to reduce the total volume of tourist activity in the world by less than 1%. This is quite comparable in consequences to other events. True, by no means of natural origin.
Crisis after crisis...
Southeast Asia is no stranger to sharp downturns in the tourism industry. In 1997, after the Asian financial crisis, tourist activity in the region as a whole fell by 1%. Of course, the events of September 11, 2001 also had a negative impact on the situation, when the fear of terrorist attacks in the air and on the ground forced many in the US and Europe to refuse trips abroad. Local tour operators had barely recovered from this event when SARS, or, more simply, atypical pneumonia, which is considered to have originated in these very places, struck. The mysterious disease scared off a huge number of tourists: in 2003, tourist activity compared with the previous year fell by a whole 8.8%.
But this problem did not scare off clients for long. By August 2004, the number of tourist trips to Southeast Asia had grown by as much as 45%. For comparison: worldwide tourist activity at that time had grown by only 12%. As experts believe, such a boom in Southeast Asian countries is explained by that very deferred demand for trips there. That is, in 2003, many of those who planned to go to Thailand or Indonesia simply postponed their visit for a year because of atypical pneumonia.
As emphasized in the WTO report, the rapid elimination of the consequences of the tsunami will also be facilitated by the fact that the international community did not stand aside from the problems of the affected countries, which was concerned not only with sanitary or food problems in the places hit by the tsunami. Attention was also paid to the problem of orphans, who could easily become victims of human traffickers. Emergency assistance is provided not only by governments but also by private business. The pharmaceutical company Pfizer alone transferred $10 million in aid and supplied another $25 million worth of medicines.
The authorities of the tsunami-affected countries are trying to urgently revive the tourism industry, which brings a lion's share of income to their state budgets. Here, governments will work closely with local and foreign businesses, and their collective efforts will, of course, be effective enough to bring tourists back to these paradise places. At the very beginning of January, the Maldivian government, together with tour operators, urgently organized a trip for journalists to the islands so that they could see that everything was fine there and there was no need to be afraid to go there.
Indeed, the countries of the region are now faced with the fact that, on the one hand, the daily display in the media of terrible footage from the places affected by the tsunami helps solve short-term tasks, namely attracting foreign aid. On the other hand, such revelations from the mass media may reduce in the future the number of those wishing to lie on the golden sand of Thailand's beaches – not far from mass graves.
However, human memory is short, and the resorts of Southeast Asia will again fill with those wishing to relax under the hot sun. And the stories of surviving locals will even add a piquant flavor to such a vacation. For now, while the smell of death hovers over the coast of Phuket, the winners in this situation are again the islands of the Caribbean region, which will receive the lion's share of wealthy American tourists who have refused trips to Southeast Asian countries.
Insurers did not suffer from the tsunami
Insurance companies around the world have hastened to declare that their costs for compensating the damage caused by the tsunami cannot be called large. Specialists of the French insurance company AXA believe that the natural disaster could cost insurers from 4.6 to 9.9 billion dollars. According to the British insurer Amlin, the total damage from the tsunami in all affected countries will amount to $10 billion. This is comparable to the damage caused in 1998 by Hurricane Mitch to the countries of Central America.
At the same time, according to Amlin, in the countries hit by the tsunami, property was insured for half as much. Indeed, in Thailand or Sri Lanka, the habit of insuring risks is not as developed as in the USA or Great Britain. In Sri Lanka itself, annual insurance spending amounts to $7 per capita, which is almost 300 times less than in the USA. The world's leading reinsurance companies Munich Re and Swiss Re have stated that in the case of the tsunami they will have to pay 100 million and 65 million euros respectively. However, it is quite possible that the number of victims and the amount of damage could have been much smaller.
"Greens" triumph...
It turns out that the areas least affected by the tsunami were those where the ecosystem traditional to many of them had not been disrupted. In areas where coral reefs and mangrove thickets have been preserved, they served as a natural buffer between the raging ocean and the land. This, according to a report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), saved many residents of the Maldives and tourists who were on the islands. And all because the government of the Maldives pursued a targeted policy of preserving coral reefs.
According to WWF, the economic effect worldwide provided by coral reefs in protecting the coastline amounts to $9 billion. The same applies to mangrove thickets. At the same time, as noted in WWF, over the past 20 years Indonesia has lost 30% of its mangrove thickets, Thailand half, and the situation is even worse in Sri Lanka.
How much tar in a barrel of honey?
Meanwhile, a couple of months before the natural disaster, the World Tourism Organization reported record growth in activity in the tourism sector of the global economy. Between January and August, the number of tourist trips worldwide amounted to 526 million, which is 12% more than in the same period in 2003. The main indicator of tourist activity in the world, calculated by the WTO, the World Tourism Barometer, stood at 3.8 (on a five-point scale) by the end of the year, which is the best figure in five years.
Preliminary results of the tsunami and measures needed to restore the local tourism industry will be discussed at an emergency session of the World Tourism Organization, which will be held on February 1 in long-suffering Phuket. In a city for which, only a month ago, no one would have thought to use such an epithet.