My Say
Post-Bali Scenarios
The Pacific Might Benefit, But It Could Also Become A Target
The coups in Fiji in 1987 and 2000 were not received in some of the stricken country’s neighbors as being utterly unwelcome events. Leisure travelers booked for a holiday in the South Pacific’s main tourist destination altered course to the benefit of tourism for the Cook Islands, Samoa, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Tahiti and Tonga.
Inevitably the October bombings in Bali, which killed at least 50 Australians and lesser numbers of European and American tourists, aroused conjecture in the marketing departments of the Pacific’s national tourism offices.
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Business is business. Can the Pacific Islands exploit the Bali horror to boost the flow of visitors to a region presented as still being safe and serene?
In late November, as this issue of Pacific Magazine was going to press, the South Pacific Tourism Organization’s tourism strategy consultancy committee was due to meet to discuss how the Pacific Islands should respond to the impact of terrorism on global tourism.
There are several ways of looking at that issue. Cold-bloodedly, can the region’s holiday destinations reap benefits from Bali and, if so, to put it delicately, how can they do so delicately? But also: Could Bali, and other Bali-like horrors that security people are grimly forecasting, pile up to cause a global travel slump?
Worst of all, could terrorism spread to the Pacific Islands?
The answers to these questions are yes, and yes, and yes, but as yet it is too early to make judgments with accuracy.
All that the Pacific Islands tourism industry, and Pacific Island governments, can do is to make careful, cool, considered assessments and try to be prepared to cope with worst-case scenarios—and of course attempt to ensure that they do not happen in the first place. The best that can be hoped for, and business is business, is that terrorism, not just in Asia, but elsewhere, including the Americans attempt to terrify Iraq, will cause a redirection of the flow of tourists in the direction of the Pacific Islands. For how long that will happen is another matter.
If there are no more Bali-like bombings, then in all probability the vast number of mainly Australian Bali holidaying loyalists will quite quickly return to that exceptionally attractive and normally calm island and any bonanza for the Pacific Islands will be of short duration. If terror does grow to stunt tourism globally, then the Pacific Islands will be able to do little more than tough it out.
The question the Pacific Islands must face is: Can the region continue to sell itself as being one of the world’s last true peace havens, allowing for hiccups in the Solomons, Fiji or PNG?
The answer is that we are as vulnerable as America discovered itself to be in September last year, and as Australia is now realizing that it is.
It would be foolish for the Pacific Islands to hope that the agents of terror will somehow overlook them.
Like Bali, the Pacific Islands in their fragility and innocence, could be seen as all the more attractive for attack by the agents of terror, since the horror so perpetrated would be that much more ghastly.
