Tourism
Visitors to Divert into the Untroubled Pacific
Now that the US and Asia are high risk areas
Hush. Don't make too much of it. But the bad news from New York, in September, might not be entirely that bad for the South Pacific.
The region's tourist trade hopes that the Pacific Islands will be perceived as, one company official put it, a "sanity" zone in which visitors can romp free, or at least virtually free, of being caught in terrorism nightmares.
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The expectation is that thousands and hopefully tens of thousands more Australian, New Zealand, Japanese and Korean visitors will head for the South Pacific, as a substitute for high risk areas in Asia and the United States.
In expectation of that, Fiji's national carrier, Air Pacific, in October announced that it was bumping up seat capacity on its Australian services by 54 percent and New Zealand by 20 percent. It will maintain North American services to Los Angeles, Honolulu and Vancouver at present frequencies, and will open a third weekly service to Japan, when Narita Airport opens a third runway next April.
Josefa Tuamotu, director of marketing at the Fiji Visitors Bureau, said despite the global impact on tourism caused by the United States disasters, the bureau was cutting its original visitor arrival forecast for 2001, by only four percent to 358,000 arrivals.
"A lot of people question that as not being realistic. But we think it is," he said. Tuamotu said the impact on travel by Americans caused by the 1991 Gulf War showed the United States market to be "very resilient".
The South Pacific's image as being a secure alternative destination area should be boosted by recent international visitor perception surveys that put Australia and New Zealand on top of the list of havens to visit. But September 11 has badly scarred travel to Hawaii, Guam and Saipan and also French Polynesia, which unlike other South Pacific destinations rely on the United States for half of their visitor arrivals.
The attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon could cause other difficulties for Pacific Islands economies.
Samoa and Tonga rely heavily for national financial stability on millions of dollars sent home annually by tens of thousands of their people who live and work in the United States.
Tonga's finance minister, Siosiua Utoikamanu, fears that coupled with the United States economic turndown before September 11, the terrorist attacks could cost Tonga about 20 percent of its 60 million pa'anga remittance revenue, so adding to the deepening of Tonga's economic worries.
Economically, Samoa is better off than Tonga. But a dwindling of the money sent home by Samoans in America would be a blow. By the end of October, the extent of damage the hideous happenings in the United States might inflict on the Pacific Islands were not then apparent. Fish exporters were worried about the availability of air cargo space to the United States.
Regional airlines were worried about rises in insurance and extra airport security costs. Garment exporters with United States customers also had qualms.
Immediate impacts on some parts of the tourism trade were obvious. Los Angeles is the main gateway to the South Pacific for tourists from North America and Europe.
French Polynesia, which relies on the United States for 50 percent of its visitor trade, was shocked by the immediate cessation of year-round cruises in the Leeward group by two purpose-built 684-passenger ships constructed with the help of big French tax incentives allowed for investment in French Polynesia.
The United States owners, Renaissance, went into bankruptcy due to massive cancellations of bookings for its cruises. Almost all passengers were Americans flown by charter flights from Hawaii. Over 1000 passengers were caught in Papeete by Renaissance¹s collapse.
The two ships were seized by creditors. Numerous local businesses, dependent on supplying and servicing them, were left with a bleak future. By mid October, Hawaii hotel occupancy rates were down by 20 to 25 percent and 12,000 tourist industry jobs were lost as international arrivals toppled by 50 percent.
Forecasts were for a loss of US$1000 million in revenue, up to 25,000 lost jobs and the delay of tens of millions of dollars of hotel renovation and other projects. The state legislature voted US$10 million for emergency tourism marketing.
Places quickest hit by the United States attacks were the United States affiliated territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Marianas, and Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and Marshall Islands. Their airports were closed for nearly a week after September 11, because they are controlled by the United States Federal Aviation Administration, which imposed stringent reviews of airport security systems.
Micronesia, in particular, suffered. Within days, 25,000 Japanese cancelled trips to Guam, and the number continued to grow. About 100 Guam-based Continental Micronesia flight attendants were furloughed The airline slashed services to Japan and other Asian cities as passengers cancelled reservations in droves.
Tumon Bay, Guam's Waikiki Beach, became a ghost town. The biggest challenge for Guam¹s tourism industry, said Visitors Bureau general manager, James Nelson, was: "Tourists are afraid to travel by air."
"Currently hotel occupancy from our members of the Guam Hotel and Restaurant Association is at 20 percent," president David Tydingco said.
Two weeks after the terrorist attacks, Northern Marianas industry officials estimated that occupancy rate was below five percent for hotels needing a 70 percent rate to break even.
Over the past two years, the Marshall Islands has dramatically increased the flow of Japanese divers, so much so that in July and August Hotel Robert Reimers was so fully-booked that it had to pass divers to a competitor, the Outrigger Marshall Islands Resort. But in the wake of September 11, some dive groups began cancelling. The problem for the Micronesian area is that the "big three" - Guam, Saipan and Palau - rely heavily on Japanese visitors, and the others - Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, Kosrae and Majuro - have fragile, fledgling industries that count visitors in the thousands (some by the hundreds), not tens of thousands, so any downturn is significant for the smaller islands.
Micronesian airports have drastically tightened security under pressure from United States authorities. Like it or not, soon gone will be the days of virtually seeing a passenger off at the stairs to the plane.
Security at South Pacific airports is "very slack," says George Faktaufon, secretary general of the Association of South Pacific Airlines (ASPA), an organisation to which all of the region's major airlines belong.
"It is very difficult for the airlines to do anything about airport security because airports are run by governments. We¹ve been talking about the problem for years, but nobody does anything."
Faktaufon said Nadi Airport, in Fiji, was the only major airport in the South Pacific to have "some form of security presence" in the way of checks and guards.
Actual security checks on boarding passengers tend to be rather perfunctory.
It's quite easy to stroll on to some airport aprons by simply sidestepping immigration and other checks through a side door.
Faktaufon says islands governments were usually reluctant to spend money on airport security. Pressing needs were for perimeter security fences and tighter screening arrangements for passengers and baggage.
Samoa, the Cook Islands and Fiji, will quietly promote the South Pacific as one of the world's few remaining relatively untroubled regions at the huge World Tourism Market fair in London in November.
But the South Pacific Tourism Organisation, to which a dozen of the region's national tourism offices belong, agreed that such promotion needed to be done "delicately."
