It seems that some­thing bad and shock­ing is always going on in some place of the world. Be it ter­ror­ist attacks, dis­eases or nat­ural dis­asters, like cyc­lone Nar­gis in Myan­mar or the recent earth­quake in China. Most of the time this res­ults in west­ern coun­tries issu­ing travel and secur­ity warn­ings either for the whole coun­try or just for affected areas. This obvi­ously is a good thing or rather it could be a good thing. After all trav­el­lers and hol­i­day makers need some kind of safety indic­ator and their own gov­ern­ment should be the nat­ural choice for that. The prob­lem here is that the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion with little travel exper­i­ence takes those travel warn­ings at face value and doesn’t usu­ally bother read­ing them them­selves. All they hear in the news is that there has been a cata­strophe some­where and that travel warn­ings have been issued.

By that point the dam­age is usu­ally done. Hol­i­days get can­celed, travel plans get changed and while every­body feels sorry for the vic­tims every­body is glad not to be caught in the after­math of it all, even though their spe­cific hol­i­day des­tin­a­tion might be com­pletely safe. Obvi­ously you can’t blame people for doing that. It’s a nat­ural reac­tion, but does it really have to be that way? And then there is the moral ques­tion of it all. Should you be enjoy­ing your hol­i­day when there are people suf­fer­ing and dying just a couple hours flight away? This is a very dif­fi­cult ques­tion and one every­body has to answer for themselves.

On Christ­mas 2004, when the tsunami struck Aceh Province, I had been liv­ing on Gili Trawan­gan, Indone­sia, for about 10 months, teach­ing diving. Vis­itor num­bers star­ted to drop within a few days of the dis­aster and kept on drop­ping over the next weeks, even though our little island was more than 2500 km away from Banda Aceh. In an industry, where your income depends mostly on com­mis­sion, this is tan­tamount to sud­denly los­ing your job. Still, I and other dive instruct­ors were in a rel­at­ively good pos­i­tion com­pared to some of the local people. We had sav­ings, had earned a lot more and didn’t need to sup­port a whole exten­ded family.

When dis­aster strikes it never only affects the people in the dis­aster areas, but large parts of the over­all pop­u­la­tion, at least in coun­tries that are depend­ent on tour­ism and vis­itor num­bers. The fin­an­cial con­sequences of the Box­ing Day Tsunami were felt all over Indone­sia. It was a dis­aster after the dis­aster. Mil­lions of dol­lars were donated, but I dare say that not much of that money made it to the indone­sian people not dir­ectly affected by the tsunami. Trav­el­lers and tour­ists fur­ther worsened their situ­ation by switch­ing to altern­at­ive travel destinations.

Only a little bit of research could show that your ini­tial travel des­tin­a­tion is com­pletely safe and if it isn’t then there is always the option of trav­el­ling to a dif­fer­ent spot in the same coun­try. It will help the local pop­u­la­tion there immensely. Of course that still leaves the mat­ter of mor­al­ity, but if you had asked an Indone­sian after the tsunami what he pre­ferred, then I’m sure the answer would have been that he’d rather earned enough to put food on the table…