BANGKOK, Thailand-
Tourism in Asia has recovered significantly more than a year after the deadly tsunami, but wary travelers are misinformed about some issues like bird flu, according to a new survey.
Interviews were conducted online in March by the Pacific Asia Travel Association among 5,601 international travelers from 10 countries–Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the U.S.
About 43 percent of the respondents said they are considering Asia as a vacation destination this year, up from 34 percent last year. Canadians were least likely to be planning a future trip there, but Americans showed the greatest increase among those considering Asia as a future travel destination–up from 20 percent last year to 37 percent this year.
Americans identified Japan as the country they'd most like to visit.
Among non-Asian travelers, Germans are most likely to visit Asia in the next year, and Swedes were most likely to have visited Asia in the past three years.
Overall, only 35 percent said the December 2004 tsunami made them less likely to visit the region, and only 28 percent expressed concern that another tsunami might hit.
But 57 percent said bird flu made them less likely to visit and 39 percent said they would be concerned about terrorism if they planned to visit Asia.
Most respondents–72 percent–knew that Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka were the countries hit hardest by the tsunami. But 50 percent incorrectly identified the Philippines as also having been affected.
Indonesia–where bombings in 2002 and 2005 killed more than 220 people–was perceived by two-thirds as the Asian country most affected by terrorism.
Regarding bird flu, a third said they didn't know which destinations have been affected, and 20 to 40 percent misidentified the Maldives, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Korea as having incidents of bird flu; none of those countries had reported the illness at the time of the survey.
More accurate were perceptions of where the illness has shown up–Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and China have all reported human cases of avian influenza, and they were the countries most often identified in the survey as having been affected.
