Travel industry expects decline after warning

The government's recent warning that al-Qaida may attempt more jet hijackings is expected to deter some travelers, although industry officials said it's too soon to gauge the effect with any certainty.

Carlson Wagonlit Travel Inc., the world's second-largest travel firm, said last week one in 10 travel agents who responded to an online survey had customers who were changing their travel plans as a result of the new warnings. The company, based in Plymouth, Minn., received responses from 145 travel agents over two days.

But John Heimlich, an economist at the Air Transport Association, a Washington-based industry group, said "you cannot perceive any material impact this early."

Heimlich said he has been in touch with several major airlines and that the industry would not be able to reliably assess the situation until this week.

When the government issued a travel warning in February "we saw actual traffic plummet quite a bit," Heimlich said, though he guessed that the impending war in Iraq magnified the impact.

This time around, the drop-off is not expected to be as severe.

That's because the Department of Homeland Security, which sent an advisory to airlines and law enforcement officials on Saturday about possible attacks in the United States and Europe, did not raise the country's terror threat level above yellow. When travel advisories were issued in February and May, the threat level was elevated to orange.

Ray Neidl, an airline analyst at Blaylock & Partners in New York, said he has not heard from any airlines that the number of people booking travel has dropped off since the warnings were made public Tuesday.

Neidl figures some consumers will reconsider travel plans as a result of the warning, but he said the industry's biggest problem these days is the weak economy.

Richard Copland, president of the American Society of Travel Agents, insisted that "travel will be impacted negatively as a result" of the latest warning, which President Bush described Wednesday as a "real threat."

Copland also questioned the usefulness of the warning.

"If they're going to say something like this, they've got to give the traveling public more information," Copland said. "For example, is there anything that we as a traveling public can do?"

American Airlines, the world's largest carrier, would not answer questions on the matter, issuing a recorded statement instead that said, in part, "we take security extremely seriously and that includes our belief that talking about security weakens what we're trying to accomplish."

On the Net

Air Transport Association: www.airlines.org