Travel Industry Hurt by Sharp Drop in Plans for Foreign Trips

As the prospect of war in the Persian Gulf looms, international travelers are avoiding the Middle East and putting European trips on hold.

The painful impact is being felt by everyone from Southland travel agents and tour operators to the major airlines.

“People just don’t want to be out of the country right now,” said Thomas Nulty, president of Santa Ana-based Associated Travel. “They are waiting until they have a better reading of the situation (in the Persian Gulf) before making plans.”

Nulty said the threat of war with Iraq has all but wiped out travel to Israel, Egypt and other destinations in the Middle East. European travel is down 50% from a year ago because of the recession and the threat of terrorism, he said. If war erupts, Nulty expects ticket sales to fall even further.

The drop in travel is bad news for the airlines, already hard hit by high fuel costs brought on by the Mideast crisis. Pan American World Airways, the largest transatlantic airline, said the gulf crisis has worsened a recession-induced decline in travel to Europe.

Also hurting Pan Am and other U.S. airlines is a sense that American carriers may be more vulnerable to terrorist attack. Nulty said one business flier this week requested a flight change to British Airways from Pan Am.

“There is an atmosphere of panic and fear,” said Robert Cazien, owner of a large travel service based in Glendale that specializes in Middle Eastern tours. Three tours to Egypt, Israel and Turkey scheduled for this month were canceled due to low turnout, and groups making the trip are smaller than usual. On Monday, a 14-member tour group started a seven-day Nile River expedition, he said. Normally, 40 people would make the tour.

To drum up business earlier this month, Isram Travel of New York packaged five-day “solidarity trips” that it billed as a show of support for Israel. Nonetheless, travel to Israel has slowed to a trickle.

“No one wants to be there on Jan. 15,” the United Nations deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, said Isram marketing director Eileen Lowe Hurt. “Everything is on hold.”

Those planning trips to the Mideast region might have a difficult time getting there, since a large number of airlines--Pan Am, Trans World Airlines, British Airways, Air France, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Garuda Indonesia Airlines--have canceled many flights to the region. Biman, Bangladesh’s international airline, suspended its flights to the Persian Gulf region on Tuesday.

To get to the Mideast, travelers would have to rely on national airlines of Israel, Egypt or other countries in the Mideast.

The flight cancellations have caused tour operators to make adjustments. When Air France dropped flights to Cairo earlier this week, Cazien had to find seats for four stranded customers on another airline. He got them tickets on Lufthansa German Airlines.

The airlines that still fly to Mideast seem to have plenty of seats. Tower Air, the only U.S. airline to continue flights to Tel Aviv, said it sold 220 of 480 seats for a flight scheduled to leave New York today.

Lou Siegel, president of Going Places, a large Newport Beach agency, said there are indications that travelers are more optimistic about travel to Europe later in the year. A 150-person school tour of Switzerland planned for July is going ahead as planned, he said.

But sign-ups for an April trip to the Holy Land are far below normal, he said “By this time, we would have at least 100 confirmed reservations, but we have only 40.”

Still, some believe that business will improve. “Our 1991 brochures are at the printers and we are going ahead with our plans,” said Hurt at Isram Travel. The agency’s next Israel tour is planned for mid-February, she said.

Meanwhile, analysts said they fear that a chunk of California’s nearly $5-billion tourism economy could become another casualty of the conflict. They said the somber mood and fear of terrorism could slow out-of-state tourism.

To some extent, Southern Californians might pick up some of the slack by visiting local theme parks or other entertainment venues. But even those trips could be curtailed in the event of big leaps in gasoline prices or shortages resulting from war.

Times staff writer Chris Woodyard in Orange County contributed to this report.