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Japan, China to Aim Tourists at Tsunami-hit Asia
Japan and China pledged on Tuesday to help put Southeast Asia's tourism industry back on its feet after last month's devastating tsunami and to urge their tourists to visit the region.
Two of the world's biggest sources of international tourism said after a meeting with Southeast Asian tourism officials that both would help promote the region's beach resorts to the 45 million Japanese and Chinese tourists that go abroad each year.
"The area affected by the tsunami was a very, very small patch of the ASEAN nations, and also these affected areas are now under reconstruction," Hayao Hora, Japan's vice minister for international affairs in the land, infrastructure and transport ministry, told Reuters after talks on a Malaysian island resort.
China's top delegate to talks with the 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) agreed, saying Beijing would also help lift the pall of disaster hanging over the region's tourism industry, worth around $30 billion a year.
"China will work closely with ASEAN countries to assist them to recover the tourism in this region," senior tourism official Sun Gang told reporters on Langkawi island, which was barely hit by the Dec. 26 tsunami but has suffered a sharp drop in visitors.
Langkawi, south of the Thai resort island of Phuket, has served as an example of the challenge Asia faces in luring back tourists, many of whom cancelled holidays around the Indian Ocean, almost regardless of whether their destinations were hit.
"It's business as usual," Malaysian Tourism Minister Leo Michael Toyad told a joint news conference after ministers and senior government officials from ASEAN nations, Japan, China and South Korea agreed to work together to rebuild tourism.
PLEA FOR A 'NICE STORY'
They made a plea for countries to stop issuing blanket travel advisories and for foreign governments and the world's media to paint a more detailed and balanced picture of the damage.
The delegates also agreed to accelerate plans to integrate Southeast Asia's tourism markets, including speeding up the issuance of tourist visas to each other's citizens. In Thailand, intra-ASEAN travel accounts for about half of its visitors.
The tsunami came as hammer blow for East Asian tourism, having only just recovered last year from the 2003 outbreak of a deadly respiratory disease, SARS. Tourist arrivals to Southeast Asia are estimated to have leapt by over 30 percent in 2004.
Thailand, the region's second most-popular destination after Malaysia, expects to lose around 30 billion baht ($780 million) in tourist receipts this year, with arrivals estimated to be down by 10 percent to around 10 million.
An influx of fellow Asian tourists could prevent a desperate situation from getting worse, according to travel agents meeting in Langkawi. They have focused on the intra-ASEAN market as a key to recovery, saying "local" tourists are better informed.
Japan and China alone could make a difference: they and South Korea account for a fifth of Southeast Asia's foreign visitors.
Japan said $1.2 million was available to spend on marketing Southeast Asia to its travellers. It has already pledged $500 million in grants to Indian Ocean countries hit by the tsunami.
Japan's Hora also raised the prospect of offering direct financial aid to Southeast Asia's tourism industry and said teams of Japanese government officials and travel agents were now touring affected countries to see what more could be done.
One travel writer suggested during the joint news conference at Langkawi that all delegates donate their free conference T-shirts to the tsunami survivors of Indonesia, where more than 228,000 are dead or missing.
But Indonesian Tourism Minister Jero Wacik said he had a better idea: "Instead of giving me your T-shirts, write a nice story about Indonesia."
Langkawi 25/01/2005
