Tag: 9.11.01
World Tourism Revenue Down 2.6 Percent
by Michael Yessis | 06.25.02 | 12:03 AM ET
The Madrid-based World Tourism Organization reports that the September 11 terrorist attacks in America helped cause travel revenue to slump throughout the world in 2001. Still, travelers spent more than $463 billion (U.S.) during the year. France was the world’s top tourist destination, drawing 76.5 million visitors, followed by Spain (49.5 million) and the United States (45.5 million).
Email to friend
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! BuzzNow Get Out There and See Your World, People!
by Jim Benning | 06.07.02 | 1:40 AM ET
Pico Iyer has offered another rallying cry in support of world travel in our post-September 11 world, this time in a recent issue of Time. We swear we’ve seen or heard him make a similar point at least several times this year alone, but somehow we never get tired of Iyer’s eloquent cheers. The world is a neighborhood, Iyer writes this time. “In any neighborhood, it is the people who keep their doors locked and their curtains drawn who are the truly menacing ones,” he continues. “One of the things about the events of last fall was how powerless most people felt as they watched the destruction on-screen. Many of us, in fact, do have the power, however small, to take the first step toward real communication—by going to Beijing, or Mexico City, or, best of all, Damascus.” We couldn’t find the essay online, but it appears in the May 27 issue.
Did September 11 Mark the End of Courier Travel?
by Michael Yessis | 05.28.02 | 5:01 PM ET
Before last year’s hijackings and terrorist attacks, adventurous international travelers often secured airline tickets at deep discounts by acting as shipping-company couriers. That’s no longer true, according to a Houston Chronicle report. The post September 11 travel-industry downturn, changes in customs regulations and increased security measures have dealt courier travel “a near knockout blow.”
Lonely Planet vs. Guidebook Writers
by Michael Yessis | 05.22.02 | 7:54 PM ET
Lonely Planet and some of its longtime guidebook authors haven’t been seeing eye-to-eye for a while. The writers say the guidebook giant has been cutting them out of the revision process of their own books, sometimes in breach of contract. Now, according to the San Francisco Chronicle’s David Lazarus, one case is going to arbitration. “The legal tussle is the latest in a series of bumps on Lonely Planet’s road,” Lazarus writes. “Following a 46 percent plunge in December sales—fallout from Sept. 11—the company said in March that it was sacking 81 people at its U.S. headquarters in Oakland and consolidating most production work in Melbourne, Australia.”
Abandoning Petra
by Michael Yessis | 05.03.02 | 10:43 PM ET
For hundreds of years, Petra was virtually off limits to non-Arab travelers. Then, after Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994, the fabled red sandstone ruins became a mandatory stop for backpackers and tour-bus travelers from all corners of the globe. Now, because of events in the Middle East and elsewhere, Petra is a ghost town. In a recent piece for The New York Times, Neil MacFarquhar traces the history of tourism at Jordan’s best-known attraction and takes a look at the repercussions of area strife. “In the years right after the peace treaty, 500 Israelis a day on average entered Petra,” he writes. “There have been just 15 in the last five months, according to Suleiman Farajat, the director of the recently created Petra Archaeological Park. The men working amid the ruins prefer it that way.”
Traveling Soon? Got Your Post-9/11 High-Security Nail Clippers?
by Jim Benning | 04.18.02 | 7:30 PM ET
Want the latest in hip travel gear? It sounds creepy to us, but the latest, according to Peter Greenberg, is baggage designed especially for high-security post-September 11 travel.
“I Still Feel a Schoolboyish Thrill Every Time I Go To America”
by Jim Benning | 04.16.02 | 11:17 PM ET
The 9/11 attack on America elicited sympathy from many around the world, but others couldn’t help feeling ambivalence, or even contempt. Noting that in one opinion poll “two-thirds of respondents outside the U.S. agreed to the proposition that it was ‘good that Americans now know what it’s like to be vulnerable,’” the editors of Granta devote the latest issue to the recently wounded nation. The theme: “What We Think of America.”
Flight Attendants After 9/11
by Jim Benning | 04.15.02 | 11:10 PM ET
Among the many changes in the world of travel since 9/11, add the role of the flight attendant. Sunday’s San Jose Mercury News offers a detailed account of the brave new world. “Since Sept. 11, when flight attendants’ throats were reportedly slashed by hijackers intent on getting into the cockpit, it’s been bandied about that flight attendants are ‘the last line of defense’ on airplanes under siege,” writes Marisa Milanese. “With the passage of the aviation security bill in November, that oft-uttered phrase was put into law; now, it’s being put to practice. All flight attendants on U.S. carriers will be trained in self-defense this year.”
Reader to L.A. Times: “Give Us the Material to Inspire”
by Jim Benning | 03.11.02 | 8:19 PM ET
Los Angeles Times reader Robin Harrington used to reach for the Travel section first on Sundays, but not in the months since September 11. Why? Harrington wants more coverage of travel to the Middle East and has been “bored stiff” by all the articles focusing on domestic travel. “Though many people may not feel safe traveling to the Middle East now, there is no reason we shouldn’t be able to read about it,” Harrington writes in a letter published Sunday. “I hope you will give us the material to inspire and prepare ourselves for a time in the future when we can experience the wonderful things this region has to offer: beautiful landscapes, mind-blowing antiquities and the warmth of a people so often portrayed negatively by our media.”
What Will Lure Wary Japanese Tourists Back to America? Ishii! Ishii!
by Jim Benning | 02.27.02 | 11:41 PM ET
Japanese tourists wary of traveling to the U.S. since September 11 just might make the haul again—not to see the state’s famed beaches or Yosemite National Park—but to see the newest member of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Kazuhisa Ishii. Japan views its athletes playing in the U.S. as rock stars, according an article in the Los Angeles Times. Said Ko Ueno, director of Japanese travel for the California Division of Tourism: “If it plays out the way we’re hoping, baseball will be our savior in this tourism slump.”
September 11 Makes its Way Into New York Guidebooks
by Jim Benning | 02.19.02 | 2:35 PM ET
Also in the Sunday’s New York Times, Joseph Siano examines how guidebooks to New York are treating the devastation of September 11: “The creators of the Michelin Green Guide and the Mobil Travel Guide series, along with other publishers, had to quickly revamp their 2002 editions on New York to reflect a city whose social, financial and geographic landscape was violently altered.”
Give me a Pina Colada and a Glimpse of Camp X-Ray
by Michael Yessis | 02.08.02 | 2:58 PM ET
Mirador Malone, a restaurant with a view of Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, has seen a rise in business, mostly from French and German tourists who want a glimpse of America’s al Qaeda prisoners. “The visitors pay $10 a head, nearly half the monthly salary of a Cuban teacher, for the chance to peer through Soviet-made binoculars at alleged terrorists six miles away,” writes David Wallis in a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle. While Wallis had no al Qaeda sightings of his own, he reports that “[t]hrough their own binoculars the guards appear to watch us watching them.”
“Fussell Was Right. We Are All Tourists”
by Jim Benning | 01.31.02 | 1:19 AM ET
Wen Stephenson was in Bombay in January 1991 when the Gulf War began, a young American tourist armed with a Lonely Planet guidebook and a taste for the exotic. In light of the September 11 attacks, Stephenson looks back critically at his journey, and at the rise of mass travel and globalization, in The American Prospect. “September 11 has already come to mean many things to many people,” he writes. “One thing it confirmed for me is that the gaze we felt upon us once, in those Eastern longitudes, has only intensified—has, in many places, turned from curiosity to fear and from fear to menace. To face this honestly means confronting the part we played in the unfolding drama and abandoning whatever comforts and conceits we may have assumed from our cosmopolitan vantage point between worlds. Far from innocent, no matter how sincerely curious we may have been, the fact is that we were globalization’s vanguard, its shock troops, its goateed expeditionary force.”
In-Flight Laughter Makes a Comeback
by Michael Yessis | 01.30.02 | 1:19 AM ET
Elliott Hester, flight attendant and author of Plane Insanity, writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that airline passengers are laughing again. “Laughter seemed inappropriate considering the in-flight horrors that occurred on Sept. 11. But maybe it’s OK to laugh now,” he writes. “In fact, we need to laugh now. Laughter - coupled with the passage of time - helps heal the wounds of tragedy.”
“Travel Publishers Seem Determined to Persevere”
by Michael Yessis | 01.24.02 | 1:41 AM ET
Conventional wisdom had it that sales of travel books would bottom out post-September 11. And, immediately, the numbers were down. American travel bookstores were reporting sales drops of 15 to 50 percent. Four months later though, according to a detailed report by Lucinda Dyer in Publishers Weekly, the outlook has improved. Guidebook sales are mostly up, and armchair travel books are a continuing bright spot for booksellers. Some bookstores, like Traveler’s Bookcase in Los Angeles, have even shifted their displays to give more exposure to travel narratives and literature. “The result: increased sales of books by Bill Bryson and Pico Iyer and the Travelers’ Tales series,” writes Dyer.
“Sales of Guidebooks to Afghanistan Have Not Been Strong”
by Jim Benning | 01.12.02 | 2:30 AM ET
The latest edition of the New York Review of Books features a story by Tim Judah about his recent travels in Afghanistan. “Sales of guidebooks to Afghanistan have not been strong during the last two decades, so the bookshop in Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel (no running water on most floors, and bring your own sleeping bag) still has plenty of copies of Nancy Hatch Dupree’s 1977 Afghanistan left on its shelves,” he writes. “It is perhaps the most extraordinary guide I have ever read.” In the same issue, Ian Buruma, author of the analytical Asia travel narrative God’s Dust, among other books, offers a historical perspective on Occidentalism, September 11 and anti-modernization movements. “There is no clash of civilizations,” he writes. “Most religions, especially monotheistic ones, have the capacity to harbor the anti-Western position.”
Lonely Planet Gets Lonelier
by Michael Yessis | 12.04.01 | 11:22 PM ET
Europeans are still traveling overseas. Australians are still traveling overseas. But Americans seem to be staying home—or booksellers think they are—and that’s forcing Lonely Planet into hard times. The mammoth publisher of budget guidebooks, which according to The San Francisco Chronicle had Americans to thank for more than a third of its $45 million in book sales last year, has seen sales plummet since September 11.
What Multiculturalism Couldn’t Do, Terrorists Might
by Jim Benning | 11.28.01 | 9:20 PM ET
Will the threat of more terrorist attacks on American soil and the subsequent interest in all things Muslim do more for foreign language competency in the U.S. than decades of multicultural studies? It sounds odd, if not terribly sad, but Margaret Talbot posits just that in a recent New York Times Magazine article. Even as multiculturalism was achieving greater prominence in academia in recent decades, sending generations of students to libraries in search of Maxine Hong Kingston novels, Americans were growing increasingly monolingual. In fact, since the 1960s, enrollment in foreign language courses declined by half. So what of the promise that multiculturalism would liberate Americans from their isolationist tendencies? “In fact,” Talbot writes, “it may have reinforced them, lulling us into the sense that we were getting a resoundingly global education when all we were really getting was a little Arundhati Roy here, a little Toni Morrison there.” The September 11 attack has added urgency to the situation. While the U.S. needs Arabic experts, colleges and universities turned out only nine Arabic majors last year. Thanks to the terrorist threat, this may change. Some courses are now filling up, Talbot notes, and scholarly books on Islam are hot sellers. “Multiculturalism may not have prodded us to study cultures fundamentally different from our own,” she writes. “The war on terrorism will have to.”
Taking America’s Pulse
by Michael Yessis | 11.11.01 | 9:30 PM ET
America’s major newspapers are doing an excellent job covering post-September 11 travel issues beyond economics. Some highlights:
Checking In: Americans Living Abroad
by Michael Yessis | 10.29.01 | 8:39 PM ET
The New York Times tracks down U.S. residents in Italy, France, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and other countries to find out how lives of ex-pats have changed in the six weeks since the terrorist attacks. Some anecdotes sound like benevolent urban legends: “Most Americans in Saudi Arabia live on enclosed compounds…At one recent dinner the conversation inevitably turned to security concerns. The couples traded stories, like the one about two Americans whose car broke down on a stretch of desert highway. They were immediately wary of two Saudi men who stopped to offer help. Sensing their unease, one Saudi turned to the Americans and said, ‘By the way, we hate Osama bin Laden.’ ” Other stories are a bit creepy and, possibly, paranoid: “Not long ago, [24-year-old English teacher Gabrielle Parnes] said, she was with two girlfriends [in Paris], giggling and talking loudly when a group of Arab-looking men walked by and purposely elbowed each of them. ‘I can’t be sure they knew we were American,’ she said. ‘But I think so. Before I might have thought they were just nasty guys. But now I can’t help thinking it was because we were American.’”