Australian Pilots Strike Ruining Tourism

Australia’s tourist industry, starved of domestic airline services for the past week, is facing ruin because of widespread cancellations by nervous overseas visitors, operators said Wednesday.

Resorts and hotels reported a slump in occupancy rates since the weekend, when travelers realized that the dispute, which has grounded all domestic airlines since last Thursday, was set to continue for some time.

“Everybody’s bleeding here at the moment,” said Gaynor Cooper, marketing manager of the Yulara Resort in the shadow of Ayers Rock in the central Australian desert.

“We would expect to be 100% full at this time of year, but our occupancy rate is very low. People are canceling because they are afraid they won’t be able to get back home,” she said.

Tourism is Australia’s most important foreign exchange earner and reaped $4.9 billion from about 2.2 million visitors in the last financial year.

“We’ve had quite massive cancellations from abroad. There’s been a huge loss of confidence,” said Owen French, manager of a string of island resorts off Queensland. “Overseas travel agents are just taking Australia out of the schedules.”

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About 1,600 pilots resigned en masse last week after the three largest domestic airlines refused to consider their demand for a 30% pay raise, bringing chaos to the transport system of the continent.

The airlines said they had received more than 800 responses from pilots to job advertisements they placed in newspapers around the world. But they warned it would take about four weeks for the applications to be processed and new pilots to be trained.

Although a few charter flights still serve tourist hot spots such as Ayers Rock, most foreign travelers come to Australia on multi-stop tickets, which are no longer feasible.

“It’s suddenly got worse since yesterday, and we’re now around 20% to 30% down on normal,” said Yvonne Singleton, public relations manager at Sydney’s Menzies Hotel.

“We’re getting a lot of cancellations of groups, mainly Japanese, for September.” she added.