Travel advisories. What to do.
FOXTROTS
Fox – sly. Trots – left-leaning (Trotsky) plus its more insalubrious meaning. Foxtrots – leading the industry in a dance.
2006 June 30
Travel advisories. What to do.
The issuance of travel advisories is by nature an awkward business.
On one side, governments are charged with protecting their travelling citizens as much as possible. On the other side, destinations are charged with ensuring that the advisories do not unnecessarily damage their visitor potential – or are limited in geographical and timing terms.
The World Tourism Organisation has produced a handbook on the topic. We believe the WTO has some positive proposals, although many are ho-hum – viz, “…ensure warnings are accurate, relevant and appropriate”.
Among the recommended guidelines (with our comments in italics) for those issuing advisories:
- Use a wide variety of governmental and non-governmental sources for gathering information. Ho-hum. This is what is done today, and “wide” is meaningless.
- Ensure their warnings are accurate, relevant and appropriate, and avoid ambiguous language and any bias or political considerations. The first part is ho-hum. The second is impossible, not just impractical.
- Encourage travellers to consult, prior to departure, all sources of information, both governmental and non-governmental. ‘All’? That is just silly.
- Be specific about the geographical location of problems and include maps and indications of distance. We know where the WTO is coming from with this proposal. It is a nice idea, but impractical if not impossible. Where, for instance, will be the next moslem/hindu clash in
India? So what is the point of pin-pointing the last one?
- [Edited] Show prudence and restraint in evaluating the threat and in the language used. Communicate in an accurate and consistent manner, by characterising the scale, probability or imminence of the problems. As above, sensible ideas, but impractical if not impossible to follow for reasons which should be obvious to all.
- [Edited] Specify nature of risk – political, social, terrorism, environmental, industrial (such as chemical or nuclear hazards), health, transport. All indisputable, apart from ‘transport’. We assume this means safe planes, buses, etc, but a complex issue. For instance, the European Union recently published a blacklist of 92 banned airlines. Should this be included now on every EU’s advisory?
- Keep under constant review, and specify date of publication. Yes. Although ‘constant’ is not possible; better to say ‘review monthly’. But see next, which would resolve all these problems.
- Publish information on a central, easy-to-use website, and update all warnings regularly.
This is WTO’s most-sensible proposal, but we are not sure WTO realises the obvious conclusion. And that is that the WTO itself must create this “central, easy-to-use website” in the way that many websites operate – with information provided by others, not the operator of the site.
The WTO can notate entries – which would be official from the governments concerned – with date of the advisory, dated response/reaction to the advisory from the destinations, and perhaps comments from actual travellers such as “We found it safe, except downtown in the evenings”.
To go further, until the WTO operates something like this, which would necessarily say “Do not visit ()”, then all its proposals are hollow. Unfortunately, we doubt the WTO, despite its United Nations status, has the backbone to solve the problem of travel advisories this way.
For instance,
Nepal was a topic in a recent issue of WTO’s newsletter. Some edited comments – “
Nepal ready for receiving visitors”, “The latest political uncertainty should not have any serious consequences for the country’s tourism industry”, “tourism has survived and produced good results”. With comments like this, will the WTO have any credibility with the travelling public?
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