Travel industry braces for bird flu
Possible outbreak concerns airlines, cruise operators
David Armstrong, Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, December 4, 2005
Hoping for the best but preparing for the worst, the travel and tourism business is gearing up for a widespread outbreak of avian flu among humans, a much-feared event that would put travelers and travel-industry workers on the front lines of the fight against the disease.
Many of the travel industry's new pandemic-prevention programs were spawned by the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome, which emptied hotels and forced flight cancellations in East Asia and North America in late 2002 and 2003. SARS killed 770 people and cost businesses about $60 billion in lost revenue, according to the World Health Organization.
The Shangri-la Hotels and Resorts, which operates dozens of four- and five-star hotels in China and is expanding in North America, saw occupancy rates at its China World Hotel, a favorite of business travelers in Beijing, dip to just 10 percent during the SARS crisis. The China World has fully recovered its trade, but Shangri-la, based in Hong Kong, is taking lessons from SARS to heart.
Shangri-la is paying especially close attention to food preparation, said Lori Lincoln, director of public relations for North America. It is requiring that all chickens at its China properties be bought from government-certified suppliers and that chicken meat be cooked above 158 degrees. So far, no guests have canceled reservations because of bird flu fears, she said.
A pandemic of human-to-human bird flu would far surpass the toll from SARS in both casualties and dollars, experts warn. The direst hypothetical scenarios have even invoked horrific memories of the 1918-19 worldwide flu pandemic that killed from 20 million to 40 million people.
The bird-flu threat presents the travel industry with a delicate dilemma. The industry has to be transparent and take its pandemic planning seriously to avoid looking unprepared or even cavalier. But tourism -- which finally began to recover over the past 18 months after several tough years -- must simultaneously address the potential bird-flu crisis without scaring travelers away and driving itself back into a tailspin.
It's an especially tricky situation for long-haul airlines, which are striving to overcome high fuel prices and fierce competition on their domestic routes from discount carriers.
Airlines, airports and hotels are working to stop a bird flu pandemic before it starts. Many stay in close touch with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization in Geneva. Neither organization has issued any travel advisories for places where infected birds have been found. The arc of infection ranges widely, from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe.
Airlines and airports are on especially high alert. Modern jetliners that zip people in hours from one continent to another also transport deadly microbes and can serve as incubators for disease. No one is known to have contracted bird flu -- which has infected some 130 people in Asia since December 2003 and killed about half of them -- on a commercial flight.
United Airlines, the dominant carrier at San Francisco International Airport, which handles more than 90 percent of Northern California's international fliers, carries protective masks on its aircraft and would isolate passengers suspected of carrying avian flu from other travelers, in accordance with interim CDC guidelines for airlines, according to United.
Moreover, passengers who became ill during a flight would use their own bathroom and biohazard bags. Flight crews would alert medical authorities on the ground to meet the plane, said representatives for United, which flies to Asia and other foreign and domestic destinations from SFO.
British Airways, another global carrier that flies from SFO, operates connecting flights to, among other places, Turkey, Greece, Romania and Russia, all countries where the avian flu virus, H5N1, has been confirmed in birds.
Although there are no travel restrictions in the affected areas, British Airways spokesman John Lampl said, the British government and the airline caution travelers against visiting live animal markets and farms and advise against handling or eating undercooked raw poultry or egg dishes.
Additionally, Lampl said, "As a result of the SARS outbreak, we carry communicable-disease packets on our aircraft, which include masks, goggles and gloves.''
Indeed, SARS serves as a template of sorts for how to prepare for scary contagious diseases.
"We went through the SARS experience, and I can confidently say that experience really helped us,'' said Philip Chen, chief executive officer of Cathay Pacific Airways, on a recent stopover in San Francisco. Cathay Pacific operates daily nonstop flights between SFO and its home base of Hong Kong, which was hit hard by SARS.
Cathay Pacific has formed a committee to prepare its staff for any eventual problem with bird flu and closely monitors World Health Organization bulletins, Chen said. But he cautioned against getting overly worried about a theoretical crisis. "We don't know if anything will happen,'' he said. "Overreacting doesn't help.''
The United Nations World Tourism Organization, which promotes leisure travel and represents tourism organizations, said panicking at the threat of bird flu could endanger the global travel industry, which generated $622 billion in worldwide revenue last year and is expected to grow 6 percent in 2006.
"We must ensure that people are not deterred from traveling without good reason,'' said Francesco Frangialli, secretary general of the U.N. agency, based in Madrid. Frangialli criticized the news media for creating an "infodemic'' of speculative reports about SARS.
Overreaction or not, authorities are getting ready, just in case bird flu does prove to be the scourge that some fear.
The CDC, for example, is increasing the number of airport quarantine clinics around the United States from fewer than 10 to 25. Such clinics briefly hold arriving passengers in isolation before transferring them to hospitals for treatment.
SFO has had a quarantine clinic for some time, according to airport spokesman Michael McCarron, who said he does not know whether it has been used in recent years. Located in SFO's International Terminal, the clinic would hold anyone exhibiting visible symptoms of serious communicable disease -- not only bird flu, but also smallpox or tuberculosis. Customs and immigration officers, he said, are trained to identify and isolate seriously ill travelers, rather than let them leave the airport and come in contact with the general population.
During the height of the SARS crisis, international airports in Hong Kong and Singapore featured high-tech devices resembling walk-through X-ray portals. The machines read people's body temperatures and conveyed multicolored images to a nearby monitor watched by airport personnel looking for signs of disease. SFO does not have these machines, McCarron said.
Last week, the CDC said it plans to ask airlines and cruise ship operators for travel itineraries and more personal data about travelers, in an effort to track down passengers who may be exposed to serious disease and not know it.
The proposal, which would not go into effect until 2007, has drawn a wary response from airlines and cruise operators, which would be required to retain passenger data for months instead of days, and criticism from privacy advocates.
International hotel chains are working up disease-prevention and treatment programs of their own.
Marriott International, which operates 2,600 hotels and resorts around the world, is stocking surgical-style respiratory masks for both employees and guests in its Asia hotels, according to the company.
Marriott representatives also said the company would take the temperatures of food handlers, if needed, and use cleaning fluids recommended by the World Health Organization for bed clothes and guest rooms should bird flu spread in humans.
