WTTC pushes ‘keep travelling’ mantra over flu fears
Don’t let any fears of swine flu affect your holiday plans this year, keep travelling — was the consensus from a panel of global tourism leaders in Brazil on Friday, as it tried to cement the industry’s reaction to the outbreak of swine flu across the globe.
“We are overacting and we are over-informing,” said Jean-Claude Baumgarten, president of the World Travel & Tourism Council at the ninth Global Travel and Tourism Summit in Florianopolis, Brazil.
“We (the industry) are feeding the situation…talking about it is making it worse…keep travelling, we need a cooler reaction to the situation,” said Gerald Lawless, CEO of the hotel group Jumeirah.
Reactions came after new data showed that if a global swine flu pandemic took hold it could cause GDP losses of nearly US$2.2 trillion to the tourism economy spread over late 2009 and into 2010.
This could be nearly one hundred times more impactful than the SARS crisis, which chipped US$25 billion off the travel sector revenues.
“If it spreads to be a pandemic that we all hope it won’t be — the effect on the tourism industry will be significant,” said John Walker, chairman of Oxford Economics who conducted the research for the WTTC.
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