Foot and mouth scare hits U.K. tourism

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, MARCH 13. As the foot and mouth disease continues to rage across Britain, it is beginning to hit countryside tourism which is a billion-pound industry and the only means of support for hundreds of small hoteliers, pub owners, taxi drivers, mountain guides and event organisers.

Normally, this should have been the start of peak tourist season but with large parts of rural Britain in the grip of an epidemic there is panic in the tourism sector as it faces huge revenue and job losses. The business which should have been nearly £ 150 million a week around this time of the season is already down by 75 per cent, according to the English Tourist Council which put the annual turnover from rural tourism at £ 12 billions. The cumulative losses because of the crisis are estimated at about £ 100 millions a week and, it is feared that the worst is yet to come.

In fact, those who live off tourism are complaining that their losses are much higher than those of the farmers and yet, unlike the farmers, they are not in line for Government compensation. Hotels and inns in ``exclusion zones'' - vast stretches quarantined to contain the spread of the disease - have closed down and events like horse races, a major tourist attraction, have been cancelled.

The biggest casualty has been the three-day Cheltenham festival in Gloucestershire which should have started this past Sunday amid expectations of nearly 175,000 visitors. ``The lack of them (visitors) mean a whole tranche of businesses, from hotels and restaurants to taxi firms and some farms will suffer'', The Independent said in a survey. It quoted Gloucestershire tourism officials as saying that they were trying to reschedule the festival for next month - because abandoning it would mean a loss of £ 10 millions.

Even areas not directly affected by the disease are being avoided by tourists because of the scare partly caused by the Government's cautionary advice. Hoteliers and tourist operators are flooded with cancelled bookings amid the grim prospect of a barren season ahead. The British Tourist Authority (BTA) is extremely concerned that the scare is denting Britain's image abroad. A BTA official, Ms Philippa Swaine, has been widely quoted as saying that the situation is beginning to worry the tourist authorities. ``The worrying thing is that we are having cancellations from France and the U.S. which are our biggest markets. This is also the time of the year that people are planning holidays for the summer and they are thinking they will give Britain a miss this year'', she told newspapers.

The view from New Delhi, according to the survey, is that Indians believe ``their country is enjoying many things their former colonial masters have seen little of in recent months: pleasant weather, political stability and decent railways.''

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