In the wake of the crisis
“How’s Business?”
That may be an innocent question … but it is one that has taken on more sinister overtones this year.
For several years the number of tourists visiting Kyrgyzstan have maintained an upward trend, but what effect has the Global Financial Crisis had on tourism in Kyrgyzstan? That’s not an easy question to answer because it is never quite clear what factors have affected numbers.
For example, the weather can play an important role. The center of the tourism industry in Kyrgyzstan is centered upon the beaches and resorts on the northern shore of Lake Issyk Kul. The clients are not drawn from Western tourists but from Kazakhstan, Russia and Uzbekistan, or are from other parts of Kyrgyzstan. Although many Westerners will have planned their trip, (to what is for them a far off destination), well in advance, and have to take “pot luck” on the weather, these tourists don’t plan that far in advance, (many may decide to take a trip on a whim), and a spell of bad weather can play havoc with the statistics.
We are often asked at the beginning of the year what sort of prognosis we have for the coming year. That is even more difficult to answer. I usually answer along the lines of: if you wait until after the season is over I can tell you how it was, but I am not sure what will happen. Part of the problem is that we receive lots of enquiries, but only a few of these eventually result in bookings – and they tend to be provisional bookings. If the tours don’t attract sufficient numbers then they tends to get cancelled, curtailed or amalgamated. We can start the season with, say, six provisional tours put on the market by our partners in Europe, but only three or four might actually materialize. Then again, it might only be one or two … or even none.
To make matters worse, the cancellations only arrive about a month before the tour is supposed to take place so, at the beginning of the season we can think that we are going to be very busy – but in the end we can have a very quiet season.
This year, for example, we put together an interesting itinerary for traveling along the central portion of the Great Silk Road – from Urumqi in Western China via Kashgar and over the Torugart Pass, through the Tien Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan to the ancient cities of Uzbekistan. There were several special features of the proposal which are not found in similar tours offered by other agents. It involved a lot of effort and discussion, provisional bookings, planning and preparation. In the end, the numbers just didn’t warrant running the trips and they were cancelled.
Back at the beginning of the year, I was beginning to get a little anxious. The number of enquiries was down on the level of previous years, the number of provisional booking lower. It didn’t look as if we were going to have a particularly good year. If I had been asked for a prognosis in April and May, then it would have been pretty bleak.
The Tourism industry, worldwide, was preparing for a disappointing year. In the face of the global financial crisis, many people were saying that they were having to economize and were not planning to travel abroad this year, but to “holiday at home” instead. There were many surveys reporting similar findings. People were planning on maybe more breaks, but shorter ones, nearer to home.
The United Nations World Tourism Organization, (UNWTO) reported that, with the exception of Africa, tourist destinations everywhere were reporting a drop in the number of arrivals during the first four months of the year – 10% in Europe, 5% in the Americas and 6% in Asia and the Pacific. (Africa actually saw a small rise of 3%.) The Hospitality industry were reporting even larger falls in the number of hotel rooms occupied.
As it happens, however, things haven’t been too bad. Most of the provisional bookings did actually materialize. There were a few cancellations like the one I mentioned above, and from far flung markets such as Brazil, but on the whole the market seemed pretty resilient. We also received quite a number of late enquiries and “drop ins”, people who had simply arrived in Bishkek and were looking for something to do now that they had arrived.
It seems that people had been sitting at home, getting depressed and finally decided that “enough is enough – we’re going on holiday … where shall we go?” More surveys began to report that Brits, in particular, had decided that holidays were one luxury that they were not prepared to cut back on.
As a result, it seems to have been a reasonable year, although it hasn’t been a particularly good one.
It just goes to show … that you never can tell and it is difficult to predict what is going to happen.
Bishkek