Expert: Disasters cause U.S. to lose appeal

Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2005 | 11 a.m.

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness ... "

-- Mark Twain

Roger Dow's business card is emblazoned with Mark Twain's famed observation about the benefits of tourism.

On Monday, Dow added a few insights of his own and praised law enforcement and security personnel attending the opening day of the two-day International Tourism Safety and Security Conference sponsored by Metro and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority at the Flamingo Las Vegas.

Dow, president and chief executive of the Travel Industry Association of America, thanked the men and women who keep Las Vegas resorts safe in the city he called "the epicenter of tourism." He also outlined how the TIA is helping put the tourism work force devastated by Hurricane Katrina back into new jobs.

"There are lots of people who do a better job of gathering and distributing money," Dow said.

Instead, his organization has built an Internet site -- www.katrinajobs.org -- to match tourism workers with openings nationwide to get the estimated 200,000 people in tourism professions along the Gulf Coast back to work. Dow praised three Las Vegas companies in particular -- Las Vegas Sands Inc., MGM Mirage and Harrah's Entertainment Inc. -- as leaders in the bid to offer relief in the form of employment.

Dow said he is concerned about the long-term effect the hurricane will have on the U.S. tourism industry. He said the Gulf Coast region is losing $50 million a day in tourism revenue during recovery.

Over the weekend, the tourism industry study group Lodging Econometrics from Portsmouth, N.H., reported that the damage to the Gulf Coast's tourism infrastructure was much worse than originally anticipated. As of Thursday, there were 160 hotels closed in Louisiana, 93 in Mississippi and 33 in Alabama, accounting for 45,832 unavailable rooms. Originally, experts estimated that between 30,000 and 40,000 rooms would be affected.

Worse, Dow said, the news media's coverage of the disaster has produced images of the downtrodden and unprepared looting stores and resorting to violence.

"It's a disaster that may have set us back 10 to 15 years," Dow said.

Dow illustrated his point by noting that in 2000, there were about 51 million foreign visitors to the United States. After the 9/11 terrorist attack, the total dipped to 44 million and by 2004 had only struggled back to 46 million.

"We thought we were going to hit 51 million this year," Dow said. "We were up 5 percent over last year."

But two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit, the trend had fallen by 15 points to a 10 percent decrease.

Dow said there is a tendency to overreact to tragedy and that he hopes that won't occur in the aftermath of Katrina.

"I'm so ticked at that guy who had the shoe bomb," Dow said, "because now, I have to take my shoes off every time I get on a plane."

He said his own wife offered an example of how tragedy can affect the mood of a potential tourist. Dow said his wife had no desire to visit Aruba in light of the disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway in May, even though his wife's daily travels take her through dangerous neighborhoods in the Washington D.C. area.

Dow said post-9/11 overreaction has taken the form of lengthy delays in foreigners getting visas to visit the United States, officials interrogating and fingerprinting potential visitors and a general perception that Americans don't care and don't want people to visit.

For the nation's tourism industry to get back on track and to realize Mark Twain's vision about prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness being eliminated through cultural exchanges and getting to know people, perceptions must change, he said.