Thirty tourists succeeded in securing five-day holidays to Phuket, Thailand after bidding online in an initiative aimed at assisting recovery from the earthquake-triggered tsunami of December 26.

Ctrip.com, the online travel company that arranged the Spring Festival tours, said that all the money the tourists spend will be donated in their names to help the ravaged region.

Tourist operators in Sri Lanka and the Maldives are also promoting packages in the hope of attracting Chinese visitors for the upcoming holiday.

From now to the end of April, Sri Lankan Airlines and the nation's biggest travel agency plan to attract Chinese visitors with reduced prices on cultural and holiday tours.

Ouyang Chaosong, in charge of the Southeast Asia division of China Travel Service, predicted that the number of tourists going to the region over the holidays will decrease by half, though trips to the Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam are already fully booked, while those to Singapore and Malaysia have begun to revive.

Zhang Guangrui, director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ tourism research center, predicted that the disaster will not only affect Spring Festival holidays, but also the Labor Day holidays in May.

At an international forum held last week in Beijing on rebuilding confidence and charting the road to reconstruction after the tsunami, Zhang Xuechun, senior financial economist of the Asian Development Bank China’s resident mission, predicted, "The impact will not last for more than half a year."

Ouyang is confident about the future. It is not the first time that the tourism in Southeast Asia is affected by disasters, he said, referring to the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) crisis in spring 2003. "The industry's ability to recover is strong."

(China Daily February 2, 2005)