The Hindu : Karnataka News : Calamity causes ripples in leisure industry

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Dec 28, 2004

Karnataka

Karnataka

Calamity causes ripples in leisure industry

By Divya Sreedharan

BANGALORE, DEC. 27. Till two days ago, Gita, a young business executive, had planned to take a New Year break in Thailand. Now she would rather stay home.

Ms. Gita, who works with Travel Corporation of India (TCI), is doing what many of her clients already have done — cancel holiday plans and stick to firm land rather than travel over water.

Their change of heart comes after the death and destruction wrought by tidal waves over most of southern Asia on Sunday.

The change of plans has, in turn, caused ripples across the leisure industry in Bangalore. "Many with tickets to foreign beach resorts have decided to cancel," observes Ms. Gita.

Many cancellations

People in the travel industry here have been keenly tracking the path of the waves. TCI, for example, has already had 15 or 16 cancellations to Langkawi (an island in Malaysia) and Thailand. "Most of these were packages for the first week of January. We contacted our counterparts in those countries about the situation there. Thankfully, we've had no casualties," Ms. Gita says.

Those in the industry understand why people have suddenly become wary of going anywhere near beaches, but this makes things difficult because most clients also want complete refunds. "A three- or four-day package ranges from Rs. 40,000 to Rs. 70,000 a person. Often, we spend a lot of money prior to each trip — our agents pay in advance for hotel rooms and so on. So it is difficult when we get demands for full refunds," she points out.

Employees at Cox & Kings and Thomas Cook have also had to deal with anxious clients. At Thomas Cook, employees have had cancellations of packages on Star Cruises. When the holiday season began, the luxury liner was promoting routes touching Dubai, Muscat, Mumbai, Goa, Mangalore, Kochi and Lakshadweep on the east, and Maldives, Colombo, Kuala Lumpur, Phuket and Singapore in the west.

A Thomas Cook employee says the cruise cost $485 (about Rs. 23,000) a head.

They have had cancellations to Maldives and Seychelles as well. "Our clients were a mix of couples and families from Mumbai and Bangalore," she says but refuses to disclose how much the company will lose on such cancellations. "How much of a refund we give depends on when the clients booked the cruises," she adds.

`Cruises diverted'

Incidentally, news reports say Star Cruises has "temporarily diverted its ships SuperStar Virgo and SuperStar Gemini, which are due to call at Phuket (Thailand) on Tuesdays and Mondays, respectively, to Langkawi following damage and destruction in parts of the island."

But one company that has apparently been unaffected is the Government-owned Jungle Lodges and Resorts. The company has beach resorts at Gokarna and Karwar, but says there have been no cancellations so far. "We are fully booked till January 5," an employee says. Each resort can accommodate up to 30 people every day.

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