Travel Firm’s Clients Fend for Themselves : Tourism: Asian hotels refuse vouchers from an Encino firm thrown for a loss because of this summer’s civil unrest in China.

Financial problems at an Encino travel company have left at least 70 Americans to fend for themselves in the Orient after hotels and other tour businesses refused to honor their prepayment vouchers, a company official said Monday.

Tourists arranged their luxury tours through Hemphill Harris Travel Corp. But because of Hemphill’s problems, hotels in Hong Kong, Bali and elsewhere in the Orient refused to accept the company’s vouchers, said Michael Jay, a vice president of marketing for Westar Acquisitions Corp., Hemphill’s parent company.

Tourists were forced to pay out of their own pockets to return home, to continue their trips at their own expense, or to seek help from another travel company, he said.

“My understanding is that nobody was stranded and left anyplace, that everybody is home or on their way home,” Jay said.

“We’re working feverishly to restructure the financing so we can pay everybody off, and we think we’ll do that by the end of this week,” he said. “We intend to pay everybody everything they’re owed.”

Jay said he thought that the only tourists affected were those on trips to the Orient. However, another tour operator, Abercrombie & Kent, said travel agents asked them for help with a group of eight Americans on a tour of Australia that had been booked through Hemphill.

Helga Westell, senior vice president of marketing at Abercrombie & Kent’s Oak Brook, Ill., headquarters, said her firm also was asked to help Hemphill customers in India and Bangkok, but said she had no further details. “We’re putting them in touch directly with our overseas offices,” she said.

Hemphill has been struggling since summer, when its business suffered a severe blow from the civil strife in China in early June, Jay said. Dozens of Americans already paid Hemphill in advance and Hemphill already had paid Chinese hoteliers for the accommodations, Jay said.

“We had to refund massive amounts of money to customers because we could no longer conduct those tours in China,” he said. Jay said he could not give an exact total, but that the refunds amounted to millions of dollars.

Since then, “we’ve had a severe cash shortage” and the company fell behind on some payments to hotel operators, he said. Hemphill, whose tours cost an average of $4,000 plus air fare, had been trying to reach an agreement with the hotel operators on a new payment plan, but negotiations fell apart several days ago, he said.

That precipitated the crisis, prompting the hotel operators to refuse the tourists’ prepaid vouchers, Jay said.

Ted Brodlieb, a New York City retiree accompanying his wife on the Australia trip that received help from Abercrombie & Kent, told the Associated Press that they were supposed to see Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tahiti after paying $20,000 for their trip.

“We don’t know what the heck happened,” Brodlieb said. “Suddenly we had no trip and no reservations.”

Abercrombie & Kent arranged to fly the eight tourists to New Zealand and back to Australia to complete a less-extensive trip, Westell said.

Hemphill is still in business, but has not been booking additional trips “to any great numbers” until its cash squeeze is reduced, Jay said. “At this point we are not canceling the 1990 season,” he said.