Travel’s Worst Nightmare Returns to Haunt Asia
Photo Credit: Tourists and locals don masks in Bangkok. Skift / Xinyi Liang-Pholsena
Skift Take
Once again a deadly health scare proves to be the only thing that can stop travel. The older Asian tourism members understand this from the SARS crisis, and now the millennials are witnessing it too.
It has often been said that nothing, be it a recession or a natural disaster, will stop people from traveling. The only thing that can, and will, is a health scare.
Asia learned that only too well from the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) crisis in 2002 and has dreaded anything like it since.
This is why the new novel coronavirus is Asia's most important challenge in nearly two decades, especially with the World Health Organization retracting its initial assessment that the global risk of the Wuhan virus was “moderate.” It now places the risk as “very high in China, high at the regional level, and high at the global level.”
The fact that China took such a drastic action as banning all domestic and international trips by citizens effective Monday sho
