The Hindu : Collapse of Swissair hits tourism hard

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jun 08, 2002

International

International

Collapse of Swissair hits tourism hard

By Gargi Parsai

Solothurn (Switzerland) June 7. The collapse of Swissair did not augur well for Switzerland tourism which has suffered a setback in the last few months.

Swissair, one of the most reputed airlines, folded up just like that. It's not as if the topline European international carrier suffered a setback following the Sept. 11 events in the U.S.

Swissair was already inching towards bankruptcy due to some bad investments made by the previous management, leaving the company with no cashflow.

The slide that had started in January of 2001 saw grounding of the reputed airline by the end of the year after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York.

Swiss Air was bought over by Cross Air, a Swiss-based airline that operated mostly in Europe. Swissair became Swiss International Air Line with about 38 per cent Government holding, the rest being privately owned. Sources say that some of the staff was retrenched and some of those who were re-hired by Swiss Air Line had to take a 10 per cent cut in salary.

Swiss operates daily flights between Delhi/Mumbai and Zurich. In the new turn of events, talking about erstwhile Swissair is almost taboo. However, Federico Sommaruga, the Zurich-based Director of Switzerland Tourism's Emerging Markets and Mandates, had no qualms telling a group of visiting international journalists here that with the collapse of Swissair, the tourism sector had lost a whole lot of promoters of Swiss tourism all over the world.

This, along with other factors, affected the foreign tourist market which had declined by nearly six per cent over last year.

However, between January and March 2001, there has been a drop in overnight stays attributed mostly to the Euro factor (Switzerland has not converted) and the Sept. 11 events in the U.S. affecting overall tourist movement and reduction in flights. India is among the markets that showed a decline of 10.3 per cent during the period, as also the Gulf, Hong Kong, Israel, Brazil, South Africa, Poland, Spain and Russia.

Mr Sommaruga made a special point of mentioning Mumbai film-makers' obsession with Swiss locales as the most favoured backdrop for "romantic film songs''.

He also admitted that lately there had been some diversion of Bollywood attention to other destinations such as Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia and added that they will launch special promotions to woo them back.

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