Getting the Bug off our Backs

Wai

ting is big in asia at the moment. At poolside lounges, bartenders languidly polish the glasses, ready to mix up a pitcher of Rob Roys if the tourists ever return. At travel agencies and airlines, staff yawn behind idle PCs one week and are ordered to take unpaid leave the next. In homes and offices around Asia, would-be voyagers are wondering when "travel accessories" will once again mean a sun hat and shades, not a face mask and disposable gloves. Some say that's next month, some next year. But until that day, the Asian travel industry is subsisting in a listless dead zone that it can only hope is the calm before a restorative storm.

"There is so much pent-up demand," says Jennifer Fox, managing director of the Hotel Inter-Continental Hong Kong, where, as at any Asian hotel, the crisis over severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) has induced an uneasy stasis. "Once the World Health Organization's travel advisory is lifted, we'll get a flood of corporate travelers in one hit." As luck would have it, the very next day Fox got her wish about the travel advisory on Hong Kong. No word yet, though, on a surge of road warriors.

Over in Bangkok, Duncan Palmer, general manager of the Sukhothai, is shrugging bespoke-suited shoulders at what would normally be a terrible occupancy rate of 35% and is waiting for September, when, hopefully, "the real pickup" will come. "Thailand hasn't been affected by SARS as much as China, but we're still tarred with the same brush. People in Europe are going, 'Hmm, darling, let's save Bangkok for next year.'"

Meanwhile, for Carmen Lam, group marketing manager of Shangri-la Hotels' 39 Asian properties, there is no return to normality at all. "We thought this was a blip in March. But it didn't get better in April; it didn't go away in May, and now we're realizing 'oh my God, this is never going away.' We have to live with it."

For Asia's hoteliers-seasoned innkeepers who have stared down many a crisis-this summer will be a write-off and SARS is the worst bottom-line bummer they can remember. It's worse, and much longer, than the slumps that followed 9/11, the Bali bombing, the Iraq war and even the Asian currency crisis. "Devastating," Palmer calls it. A last-quarter spike in visitor numbers is more than a prediction these days: it's an article of millennial faith.

Business travelers are returning in small numbers, but "if anyone had to post a guess as to market recovery, I think we'll see it come towards the end of the last quarter," mulls John Kodowlski, managing director of the Pacific Asia Travel Association's strategic-intelligence center. "It'll start building up in October and go through to December."

As for leisure travelers, they are few and far between, and generally fall into the expat weekend-getaway category: the couple deserting SARS-afflicted Hong Kong for a spa weekend in Bali, a lonely bachelor checking out of a subdued Singapore for a Bangkok party break. "Intraregional travel is leading the pack," says Kodowlski "because places aren't so far from home. People are closer to the reality of SARS; they see behind the media hype."

Robert Khoo, CEO of the National Association of Travel Agents Singapore, is also seeing outbound travel "picking up slowly" but at half of last year's seat occupancy. "And there's another issue. Some companies still insist that people quarantine themselves when they get back from holiday, even from a non-SARS country."

Sandie Lee, a Hong Kong travel agent, has spotted the same trend. "Customers tell me their companies don't want them to go anywhere," she laments, "just in case they bring some bug back." But she is seeing the odd booking "for the end of June, to places like Singapore and Phuket, and promotions by airlines have done very well."

Very well for the consumer, naturally. For airlines, the nightmare continues in a stream of profit warnings and shrunken timetables. This is, opines Richard Stirland, director general of the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines, "merely the end of the beginning" of the crisis. In Manila, a Philippine Airlines spokesman echoes the mood of many in aviation: "I've just come from a meeting, and I can tell you we can't see the end of the tunnel. When will schedules get back to normal? We can't think about anything except cost cutting right now."

A booking here, a few visitors there. Despite official supplications, most people remain in situ. "SARS is here to stay, just like high-security checks" is the blunt summary of Jennifer Cronin, area marketing manager of the Grand Hyatt Singapore.

We all have to live with this deflating fact: it could be a long, hot and very quiet summer.