Tourism biz deals with flu fears

By Richard N. Velotta (contact), In Business reporter

Fri, Oct 30, 2009 (3 a.m.)

Just as Southern Nevada has begun claiming some small victories in its rebound from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, along comes another potential setback: concerns over whether travelers would stay at home to avoid being exposed to persons carrying the H1N1 virus.

While local tourism leaders aren’t panicking about whether frightened travelers would stay home to dodge swine flu, they are in full communications mode with their employees to head off the spread of germs and educating them about a disease whose name may be the scariest thing about it.

The devastating effect to an economy resulting from widespread panic and travel bans is fresh in the minds of many tourism experts after what happened in Mexico earlier this year.

The Washington-based U.S. Travel Association said 250,000 travel industry jobs and $4 billion were lost in Mexico as a result of restrictions imposed during the H1N1 pandemic.

Geoff Freeman, a senior vice president with the U.S. Travel Association, said the United States can learn from the Mexican experience to “proceed with caution, but put evidence and facts ahead of fear and fiction.”

“I think we learned about what can happen if you make decisions without adequate information and the economic impact of those decisions,” he said.

Local authorities have learned the lesson.

“We’re following the lead of the Southern Nevada Health District and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, communicating on a regular basis and relaying that information with our partners,” said Vince Alberta, spokesman for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

“What continually is reinforced is that while it (H1N1) has received a lot of media attention, regular seasonal flu presents a greater threat. That gets lost in some of the coverage.”

The greater threat is that seasonal flu is more widespread, but H1N1 has received more attention because 1,000 people that contracted it in the United States have died.

But the most important message the tourism industry can share is that commonplace protective measures — washing hands frequently and coughing and sneezing into a sleeve instead of a hand — can limit the spread of the disease effectively and that H1N1 shouldn’t preclude travel.

One organization has a plan that changes something you see every day at the city’s convention centers.

The Association of Corporate Travel Executives is calling for a major deviation from business protocol, calling for the temporary elimination of the handshake.

“We have also been told that the best way to impede the spread of the H1N1 flu virus is to repeatedly wash our hands, especially after touching our faces, or coming into contact with someone else’s face or hand,” said Susan Gurley, executive director of the 6,000-member ACTE, based in Alexandria, Va.

“A random polling of ACTE members has revealed it would be easier to drop the traditional handshake, for the duration of the health crisis — should one develop — as opposed to sneezing or coughing into a sleeve.”

Swine flu already is considered widespread in 46 states, including Nevada. Last week, President Obama declared swine flu a national emergency, primarily to enable hospitals to transfer patients to alternate sites for triage and treatment if they are overwhelmed with sick people.

But none of the health agencies are calling for a ban on travel. While Obama’s move was a routine procedure, it got attention in several foreign countries where the U.S. government process isn’t understood.

Still, there is evidence that despite health agency reassurances, travelers may stay home or delay travel if the H1N1 virus becomes more widespread.

A survey co-authored by the U.S. Travel Association and reported by earlier this month by Hotel magazine indicates that two-thirds of U.S. adults expect there to be a more extensive outbreak of swine flu this fall and winter compared with last spring and that one-third of those surveyed said they would alter their travel plans should their intended destination have a widespread outbreak of H1N1.

The survey also said 45 percent would postpone their trip until after an outbreak subsided, 33 percent said they would visit a different destination and 31 percent would cancel their trip.

Bill Lerner, a gaming analyst for Las Vegas-based Union Gaming Group, said while a pandemic is a real risk to investors, it’s not a fundamental issue over the long term.

“It’s definitely a temporary, transient risk to transportation and to cities that rely on transportation,” Lerner said. “But Las Vegas is not at any greater risk than any other similar city.”

He noted that if Las Vegas tourism were to be affected by swine flu, it probably would have already happened. Lerner said September visitation numbers were off slightly from the previous year, but it there’s no evidence to suggest they would have been any better if swine flu hadn’t been in the headlines.

Lerner, who suffered a bout of swine flu earlier this year, said one of the big take-aways he learned in a recent session he attended with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is that resorts can be proactive by liberalizing their work leave policies.

Napolitano said one of her agency’s top priorities today is addressing swine flu issues and that resorts can prevent their employees and guests from being at risk by having reasonable leave policies in place to allow a worker to go home if they start to feel sick.

While some are fretting about what would happen if H1N1 spreads, MGM Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman said it’s too late to worry about the future — the swine flu is already here.

“It’s not something that may happen,” he said. “It is happening. We see it in our schools, our churches, our temples and our workplaces. We’re dealing with it now.”

Feldman said it is important for the public to keep the severity of the matter in perspective. It’s only when people lose that perspective that the local tourism industry would get hurt.

“We’ve seen flues that have been very severe in the past but didn’t have the names or the media attention that this one had at the very beginning. Panic got kicked up very early, but then there was nothing for awhile and people seemed to get used to it. Now, it’s kicked up again because of all the stories about vaccinations, delays in delivering them, long lines and people waiting to get them. I think we’re completely missing the point if we say people shouldn’t be traveling,” Feldman said. “You can’t hermetically seal yourself into your house.”

A high-profile newcomer to the Las Vegas tourism industry, London-based British Airways, says it’s ready to contribute to awareness programs. Executives of the airline, which started flying nonstop between London and Las Vegas last week, likely remember Singapore Airlines’ service to McCarran from Hong Kong in 2002, derailed less than a year later in part because of travel fears surrounding the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Southeast Asia.

“We’ve had very detailed planning in relation to pandemic for some time,” said Willie Walsh, CEO of British Airways, during his visit to Las Vegas last week for BA’s inaugural flight. “Back in November 2007, we ran a two-week desktop exercise about pandemic flu in anticipation of something like this happening.”

Walsh said British Airways didn’t have a dramatic downturn in business in Mexico this year, but he and the company did learn a lot.

“I think the outbreak in Mexico was a wake-up call to the industry and I think we were able to test a lot of our systems and test a lot of our processes and I think it gave the health authorities and regional governments an opportunity to test theirs.

“What surprised us, when we saw the outbreak in Mexico, was just how ill-prepared a number of companies were, so you saw people implement policies that were unsustainable. You had people saying that if you’ve flown to any place that had an outbreak that you would have to voluntarily quarantine yourself. And then they realized that that just about meant everybody because you had outbreaks across the globe.

“It’s clearly a concern, but we realized that there are good systems and processes in place and what’s important is that people stick to them,” Walsh said. “The world has to move on. You can’t shut things down. You can’t stop.”