SARS impact deminishing in Japan?

Traffic up across all search engines on travel site

[whats up skip]

For about the last four weeks we have seen an increase in traffic, number of page views and time spent on our travel related site.

The referrals are up across all the major search engines. With little change in our position in Google (we all know about that one :( ) the only thing I can think of is SARS.

[David_M]

When I heard about SARS affecting the travel industry, I checked the travel websites to see if airfare etc. had been reduced.
Maybe others did the same?

[digitalghost]

With a mortality rate less than the common flu the "impact" of SARS should have never been felt.

FEAR! SELL THE MASSES SOME FEAR!

[bill]

There's a big travel company on the first floor of my building. They were running a campaign this morning for package tours to Asia and there were people lined up around the block (well over 100) waiting an hour before the place opened. I rarely saw that before SARS. I think the people here will hop on a travel bargain.

There were no documented full blown cases of SARS in Japan, so the reality of the whole situation never surfaced here. People will travel. They just need the TV to tell them to travel again. ;)

[bill]

Yahoo article [asia.news.yahoo.com]

JTB Corp. said Wednesday the number of Japanese traveling overseas in the summer vacation season is likely to fall 24.7% from a year earlier, the largest drop since the travel agency began providing a forecast in 1969.

It appears that it will be a while before the travel industry recovers. Although people are starting to look at travel again SARS, terrorists and the war have really put a damper on things this year.

[Monkscuba]

Same story here in Thailand. The last few months have been bad. Hotels empty, staff being cut, nobody in the streets (compared to normal). SARS hardly touched Thailand, but the panicky media coverage did. Thailand = Asia = SARS. We are getting bookings now for next high season (begins October), and I have been sure to put SARS info and links to the WHO on our web site, so people can see that the WHO no longer has any travel restrictions anywhere in Asia. The final two countries (China, Taiwan) were taken off the list on the 5th July.

Still, as digitalghost says, it's the fear factor. There were more SARS cases in Europe or the USA, and certainly in Canada than here in Thailand, but it's the fear of the unknown and strange foreign countries that continues to keep people away.

The news media are very good at making a big story out of SARS, all over the front pages and on TV. Fear sells.

The news that SARS is all but gone is not such big news. Maybe a small paragraph on page 7. The media did a good job of killing off tourism here in Asia. If they could run some big "SARS IS GONE" stories to make up for the "SARS WILL KILL YOU" stories, we'd be happier.