At 9.30 on Wednesday night, I caught a train to Madhya Pradesh from the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Apparently, just 10 minutes after that, the shooting started.
Ram Badrinathan | The Travel Expert
When this kind of thing happens, in the travel industry there is always a short-term, a middle-term and a long-term impact. You saw that with the 9/11 attacks in New York and the Bali bombings. But there is usually a quick rebound. The travel industry is very resilient.
These attacks seem to have been staged specifically for television, aimed at the global media. This will definitely impact business travel into Mumbai, because Mumbai at the end of it all is still a business-travel destination. India-bound travellers have already made bookings for the upcoming tourist season, and everybody down the travel chain has been paid—so the tourists will now have to take a call on their plans. It’s possible we won’t see as many cancellations as we fear. Also, our domestic market is always resilient. Had this been Singapore or Hong Kong, we would have had to depend entirely on foreigners coming into the country, but that isn’t the case here. Hoteliers don’t usually focus on the domestic market; maybe now is the time.
Ram Badrinathan is general manager, Asia Pacific, of PhoCusWright, a travel industry research firm.