Tourists Begin to Fill Void in Wake of SARS

At the Garden of the Humble Administrator, a Ming Dynasty jewel here in one of China’s most popular tourist towns, the tally of daily visitors reached 7,400 last Sunday.

That is very close to a normal crowd, said Bao Lan, an official at the garden. The turnout is also a huge jump from a few months ago, when a grand total of 40 tourists showed up.

“At the height of SARS, there was a sort of silence in the garden that no one here could ever remember experiencing,” recalled Bao, who helps oversee the 500-year-old garden and its intricate network of stone pathways. “Our annual azalea exhibition was on display from March to May, and it was a pity nobody could come to appreciate that serenity.”

Now, she said, people here are glad just to have the crowds back.

After suffering a devastating blow this year with the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, tourism is on the rebound in China and other countries across Asia.

Hotels are reporting a surge in bookings, especially in Hong Kong, where some of the territory’s landmark destinations that were practically empty two months ago are now almost fully occupied. Many Asian airlines say they have restored flight schedules to pre-SARS levels.

But the recovery is hardly complete. Some destinations still report a sharp falloff in visitors, and China in particular will struggle for some time to cope with huge tourism-related losses.

After drawing in revenue of about $67 billion from tourism last year, an 11.5% increase over 2001, China is projecting earnings of about half that for this year.

The lost revenue include about $8.8 billion from overseas visitors who canceled trips because of SARS fears, said He Guangwei, the head of China’s National Tourism Administration, who spoke at a recent summit in Beijing of tourism ministers from China, Japan, South Korea and several Southeast Asian nations.

China is trying to draw visitors, both foreign and domestic, back to its tourist sites, in part by subsidizing deep discounts for some travel packages and in part by launching a new promotion campaign with the slogan “China Forever,” He said.

At the same time, neighboring Asian countries are trying to attract more Chinese tourists, viewing them as a lucrative potential market because of China’s rising economic fortunes. SARS virtually cut off foreign leisure travel by the Chinese, but with the World Health Organization declaring last month that the virus appeared contained, many countries are hoping that the stream of Chinese tourists will pick up again.

Singapore’s Tourism Board announced recently that it would award a package of shopping and hotel discount coupons to the first 1,000 Chinese tourists who signed up for at least a three-night trip there. Tourism accounts for as much as 15% of the gross domestic product in several countries in the region, according to the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations.

China, in return, has sought to attract tourists by loosening or even eliminating visa requirements for citizens from many Asian countries, including Singapore, Brunei and Japan.

In Hong Kong, where the numbers of business and leisure travelers dropped 67% in May compared with the same month in 2002, the government has launched an aggressive campaign, with discounted prices, to attract travelers.

In many ways, Hong Kong, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, seems to be back to its normal bustle. Major hotels such as the Mandarin Oriental, Island Shangri-La and the Ritz-Carlton are at or near full occupancy, and retailers and restaurants say their business is back to full strength.

Simon Cooper, the president and chief operating officer of Ritz-Carlton, recently traveled to the company’s hotels in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore, in part to give something of a pep talk to employees who had been forced to take partial furloughs in the spring because business was so bad.

Cooper said several of the major hotel chains had banded together to coordinate a “welcome back” tourism campaign in those cities.

“We all realize this is not a time to be selfish -- it’s a time to look beyond individual hotels,” Cooper said.

For regular visitors, SARS fears “seem to be a nonissue,” Cooper added. “The people we have to convince to come are the ones who have never been here before.”

Tourists are also returning to places like Suzhou, a historic town about 40 miles west of Shanghai where several big gardens and pagodas are laced in a network of willow-lined canals so extensive that Marco Polo once called it the Venice of the Orient.

Li Yinhua, 51, has spent most of the last 20 years in the canals, piloting small tourist boats. This spring was a disaster, Li said.

“It was just unbelievably quiet out in the water, no one was around,” Li recalled. His company lost about $12,000 in business.

Now it is operating at close to normal levels, with domestic tourists spearheading the recovery, Li said. Like many operators of the classical gardens and tour companies here, he noted that the numbers of Western visitors still seemed to be down markedly.

Many of the Chinese tourists here said they felt tremendous relief at simply being able to get out and travel again. There were severe restrictions placed on tours during the height of the SARS outbreak, from March to May, and many said they would not have traveled then even if they had been allowed to do so.

“It felt dangerous, it felt very scary to take a trip then,” said Chen Zhendong, a 22-year-old accountant from the city of Wuhan. “It was a mysterious, brand-new disease. You had no idea what you were dealing with.”

Chen, who was on a two-day sightseeing trip here, said it appeared that “everything has returned to normal.”

Zhu Shunyi, a Taiwanese businessman whose company makes publishing equipment at a plant near Shanghai, a 45-minute train ride away, was on a business trip to the mainland and brought along his wife and two young sons.

“The SARS time was too dangerous for me to bring my family here,” Zhu said as he and his family strolled in the lotus-filled garden. “Now it’s safe to do that.”

Bao, the garden’s administrator, said she noted rising numbers of Japanese and Korean visitors, and she expressed confidence that the crowds would be back to normal levels within a few weeks.

But she and others also worried that SARS could prove to be a seasonal virus that would return with cooler weather, potentially decimating crowds all over again.

Nor is a return of SARS the only worry for tourism officials in Asia. Although China has been largely immune to terrorism, that is not true elsewhere in Asia, especially in Indonesia. The number of visitors to the Indonesian island of Bali is still down sharply since last year’s bombing there, and the Aug. 5 suicide bombing of the JW Marriott Hotel in downtown Jakarta, which killed 12 people, will probably deter some visitors.

Ministers at the recent tourism summit in Beijing expressed revulsion at the bombings, calling them a “heinous and ruthless crime against humanity” in a joint statement. But they said that if tourists stayed away, that would only help the terrorists achieve their aims.

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Times staff writer Zhang Xiuying contributed to this report.