Earl Evleth

Nice to have some good news.

Earl

***



The World Beckons, and American Travelers Can't Resist


By Jane Engle and Christopher Reynolds, LA Times Staff Writers

Facing war, scorn, terrorism, a tentative economy, a weak dollar and
daunting transatlantic fares, hundreds of thousands of American tourists
have come to a resounding conclusion this summer: They don't care.

They're going on vacation, and they're going overseas, in numbers not seen
for years. By every major measure and against indicators that would suggest
a different picture, U.S. leisure travel abroad is surging.


"I had no hesitation about coming here, though every adult in my life was
cautious," Ashley Thomas, 22, of Reseda said one recent day at the Louvre in
Paris. "My philosophy is: I can't live in fear. I'm the perfect age for
Paris."

This increase in Americans headed abroad has startled the travel industry,
which peaked in 2000 and early 2001, suffered billions of dollars of losses
after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, then limped through two years
of fitful recovery until this swell began. In the days leading up to the
Fourth of July weekend, industry leaders were still struggling to explain
the numbers.

Maybe, some say, it's simply a matter of national cabin fever, a populace
tired of staying home. Or maybe, others suggest, the prototypical American
tourist is transforming from nervous neophyte to savvy traveler.

"I've never been so busy in my life," said Ada Brown, a travel agent for 28
years and owner of Seaside Travel in Long Beach.

"It's becoming almost impossible to get air space," she said, although
that's partly because some airlines are still flying lighter transatlantic
schedules than they were before Sept. 11. "We've got some people, we've been
trying for a week to get them to Italy." This, she added, is despite summer
round-trip fares from Los Angeles that frequently top $1,000.

Like many close observers, Brown starts her explanation with the words
"pent-up demand," can't cite a tipping point and scoffs at the idea of the
Athens Olympics, scheduled to begin Aug. 13, as a factor in the boom.

In fact, said Ed Daly, a European regional analyst at IJet Travel Risk
Management, which advises multinational corporations, many people view the
Athens Games as "a magnet for terrorism."

A Surprising Surge

Yet travel industry veterans report soaring bookings throughout Western
Europe, many of them made after the March 11 train bombings in Madrid that
killed nearly 200 people.

Louanne Kalvinskas, co-owner of Distant Lands travel store in Pasadena, is
among those who have plunged ahead: Three weeks after the Madrid bombings,
she signed on for a weeklong Elderhostel art history seminar in the Spanish
capital. She arrived in May, along with five other Americans, and enjoyed an
essentially perfect stay, troubled by neither the prospect of further
terrorism nor broad Spanish disapproval of U.S. moves in Iraq.

Daly says the more visible security forces in many European nations provide
psychological reassurance.

"People feel more comfortable and confident when they see a greater security
presence," he said.

Europe is the leading destination for Americans heading overseas. British
tourism officials said nearly 1 million Americans arrived from January
through April, the most for that period since 2001. In Dublin, Irish tourism
officials said first-quarter arrivals from the U.S. were up 22%, the biggest
increase in four years. Even in France, whose opposition to U.S. policies in
Iraq prompted anger on this side of the Atlantic, first-quarter arrivals
from America were up 10%.

The decision to travel means "people are coming to their senses," said
Edward Hasbrouck, who holds the title of "travel guru" at San
Francisco-based travel agency Airtreks.com and is the author of "The
Practical Nomad," on around-the-world travel.

"They may be skeptical the first time someone says, 'You can go to places
where the American government is unpopular,' " Hasbrouck said. "But the 10th
or the 50th time they hear, they finally begin to believe. The word's
getting out: It's still a wonderful world."

It's also a world that relatively few Americans have sampled.

The proportion of Americans holding active passports has hovered around 25%
since before the terrorist attacks, the weakening of the U.S. dollar and the
widening of protests against the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

For many foreign observers, that statistic reemphasizes the image of
Americans as a people looking more inward than outward.

For travel industry executives, other numbers hold greater interest these
days:

€* Montrose Travel in Montrose, one of the 50 top-selling travel agencies in
the U.S., reported foreign bookings were up 126% through June 6 this year
from the same period last year.

€* International air traffic on U.S. carriers, though still behind the
banner numbers of early 2001, was up nearly 20% through May compared with
the same period last year. U.S. airlines say traffic on international
flights is growing more than twice as fast as on their domestic routes.

€* At the U.S. State Department, the volume of passport applications, more
than 23% ahead of last year, is on track to set a record for the fiscal
year. More than 8.4 million are expected to be issued this year.

This burst "sure has surprised me," said Tom Hale, founder and president of
Berkeley-based Backroads, which takes about 13,000 travelers yearly on
cycling, walking and multi-sport tours worldwide. "I really thought the
trend we saw last year ‹ staying close to home ‹ would continue."

Instead, Hale said, Backroads' bookings for European trips this summer are
up 50% from last year; bookings for winter trips to Latin America and Asia
are up 80%. The company is on track to surpass the revenue record it set in
2000, Hale said, even though its bookings for North American trips are down
slightly.

Upbeat news on the domestic economy must have played a role in this, Hale
said. But he added, "I think people are maybe starting to be a little more
pragmatic about what the likelihood of one of these [terrorist] events isÅ*.
Several years ago, that Madrid bombing would have had a big effect on travel
to Europe. But it didn't."

Meanwhile, the State Department's most recent "worldwide caution," issued
April 29, says that it remains "deeply concerned about the heightened threat
of terrorist attacks" against Americans abroad.

Resisting Fear

"If something's going to happen, it's going to happen," said Michael
Raimondi, a Los Angeles business owner browsing the Flight 001 travel store
on West 3rd Street with daughters, Stella, 3, and Francesca, 7 months.

Raimondi, planning a 1,000-mile bicycle ride in France to raise funds for a
hospital, said he refused to let terrorists change his lifestyle. Yet, once
he gets out on the road with his cycle, he said, "I'm not wearing a USA cap,
that's for sure."

Leslee Salrin of Long Beach, a 49-year-old mother headed for Italy, counts
herself in the same camp.

"Know what didn't influence my decision? Fear," Salrin said before her late
June departure for Rome. "If something's going to happen, it could happen
here or it could happen in Italy. But I have a 13-year-old boy, and this is
possibly the last year he'll be willing to be seen with his mother. It's
going to be Max and Leslie's Wild Adventure in Italy this summer."

Rick Steves, guidebook author and European travel authority, reported in a
recent e-mail from Switzerland that he had seen greater security than ever
in Europe this summer, along with widespread scorn for U.S. foreign policy.
That includes hoteliers "letting their politics be known to their American
guests" and Canadians who seem "particularly proud to be Canadians" this
year, Steves said. But most Europeans, he added, "have an amazing ability to
not hold individual citizens accountable" for their government's actions.

Analysts also have found increased interest in the Southern Hemisphere, from
Latin America to New Zealand to Africa.

"It seems like everywhere you look, we're on the verge of Armageddon, and
yet our numbers are strong," said Ann Bellamy, president of Glendale-based
tour operator African Travel Inc. "For June and July, I'd say we're up 20%"
over 2003. Her customers, she theorizes, "are just sick and tired of being
on this perpetual yellow alertÅ*. And they're doing something that they've
always wanted to do."

But experts say a crisis such as an economic downturn, a reemergence of the
severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in Asia or a new terrorist attack
on tourists could cool this ardor.

"I think people are holding their breath, taking a calculated gamble" on
traveling abroad again, said Reid Wilson, a psychologist specializing in
anxieties and a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Medicine.

Another big terrorist attack and "a lot of these fears are going to come
roaring back," he said.

*

Miss L. Toe

"Earl Evleth" <> wrote in message
news:BD103B54.3D926%...
    > Nice to have some good news.

Having more Mercans in europe is good news ? :-)

Earl Evleth

On 6/07/04 11:22, in article , "Miss L. Toe"
<> wrote:

    > Having more Mercans in europe is good news ? :-)


Money is one thing, but it will help the
'peans realized that Bush is the exception.

    :-)