Travel news around the world: Travelers Weigh Whether To Visit Paris After Attacks

Sunday 21 August 2016

Travelers Weigh Whether To Visit Paris After Attacks

Even as airlines operated a normal schedule of flights into and out of Paris, travelers with future plans to visit the French capital reconsidered their options after a series of terror attacks. Some quickly canceled their tickets, a worrisome sign for the travel and tourism industries.

Joe Nardozzi, a 31-year-old New York investment banker, and his wife won't be taking the wedding-anniversary trip they planned later this month.

"I have no interest in losing my life over a trip to Paris," he said.

Travel agents said some clients called to cancel trips, and one advocacy group for business travelers predicted that corporations would let frightened employees do the same.

Blake Fleetwood, president of New York-based Cook Travel, said about 10 customers out of the roughly 30 with trips booked to Paris told him they want to cancel. He and his wife might do the same next month.

"It's a terrible situation," Fleetwood said. "It's going to hurt the travel industry, the hotels, the airlines, the restaurants."

Tourism to the French capital already took a big hit earlier this year from the attacks in January that killed 17 journalists, police and shoppers at a kosher grocery. The Paris tourist office said the number of hotel stays fell 3.3 percent in the first three months of the year, a drop it blamed specifically on the January attacks.

The situation had just begun to improve, with summer visits by U.S. travelers, who are Paris' biggest group of foreign visitors rising significantly.

Consumers with travel insurance that includes terrorism coverage can probably recover the cost of a trip to Paris, according to Squaremouth, a policy-comparison website. But even policies that cover terrorism may only apply to trips scheduled in the next week or month and might not apply to travel in other parts of France or Europe more broadly, a company spokeswoman said.

Wendy Perrin, who writes about consumer topics for TripAdvisor, encouraged people to keep traveling in a post on her Facebook page.

"The answer is not to stop traveling ... The answer is to keep traveling, to make friends around the world, to be a thoughtful ambassador for your country," she wrote.

Even travelers who go to Paris are likely to be in a less celebratory mood. Toronto residents Mark Hutchison and Ashleigh Marshall planned a big night out during a Paris stopover on their trip back home from Tanzania — "go to a restaurant, go to a bar, have a glass of wine," Hutchison said. Instead, they decided to hunker down in their hotel with a bottle of wine once the sun went down Saturday evening.

"It's a lot to take in," he said of the deadly attacks. "You can't make sense of it."

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Greg Keller in Paris, Joan Lowy in Washington, Marley Jay and Scott Mayerowitz in New York, Nour Youssef in Cairo, John Leicester in Paris and Juan Lozano in Houston contributed to this report.

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