In the hours after the terror attacks in Paris on Nov. 13, airlines, hotels and travel agencies witnessed a surge in cancellations as anxious visitors sought to avoid the French capital.
The attacks, which targeted Parisians and foreigners attending a rock concert or sitting at restaurants and cafes, killed 130 people and wounded hundreds more.
They also threatened one of France’s most vital sectors, tourism, as Paris joined a long list of cities like London, Madrid, Beirut and Mumbai in India where terror struck indiscriminately.
But a recent analysis of the effect of terrorist attacks on travel and tourism suggests that the long-term effect is more muted than after a natural disaster. The finding is significant for France, which is the world’s top tourist destination, with 84 million foreign visitors last year, and where the travel and tourism industry accounts for nearly 9 percent of the country’s economy.
London and Madrid, for instance, both had a fast rebound in foreign visitors after they were bombed, according to a study by the World Travel and Tourism Council, a trade group that includes hotel chains, airlines and tour operators.
The group found that, on average, it takes about 13 months for tourism to recover after a major terror attack, compared with about 24 months after an environmental disaster.
“Terror attacks tend to be very localized, and happen in one place and at one time,” said David Scowsill, the group’s president and chief executive.
Olivier Jager, the co-founder and chief executive officer of ForwardKeys, a travel data-analysis company, said flight cancellations to Paris lasted for about five days after the attacks. Bookings for future trips, in the meantime, had dropped by about a third compared with the same time last year, suggesting that the effect of the attacks might be felt for several months.
“Travel, and specifically leisure travel, is very fragile but it is also super-resilient,” Jager said. “Leisure travelers are not booking today. But it’s not fear, it’s common sense. You can’t blame them.”
Experts say they believe that although the current mood in Paris is bleak, and the city appears to be in shock, the recovery could come quickly. Scowsill noted that after the bombing of the Madrid Atocha train station in 2004, which killed 191 people, foreign visitor levels returned to prebombing levels within weeks.
In London, where 52 people died in coordinated bus bombings in 2005, there was hardly any effect on tourist arrivals in Britain, according to the trade group.
Other countries, however, have seen sharper declines and are still struggling after repeated attacks aimed at foreign visitors.
Tunisia, for instance, was hit several times this year, including in the last week when a suicide bomber killed 12 members of the presidential guard. In March, assailants attacked the Bardo Museum in the capital, Tunis, leaving 22 people dead, most of them European tourists. Then in June, a single gunman massacred 38 people on a beach in Sousse that was popular with British tourists.
“I’m afraid we’re witnessing a situation that has reached the point of no return,” Jager said about the short-to-medium term prospects for Tunisian tourism. “There is really no hope of a rebound in tourism there.”
Egypt has also seen a big drop in visitors. It lost about 5 million annual visitors after the political turmoil of the Arab Spring that began in 2010, according to Scowsill. But the country still greets some 10 million visitors each year, many of them Russian, especially to beach resorts in Sharm el-Sheikh.
This explains why the recent bombing of a Russian airliner leaving Sharm el-Sheikh was a particularly hard blow for Egyptian tourism.
“Terrorists have proven that Sharm can be attacked, even though it was under heavy protection,” Jager said. “Can Sharm continue this way?”
Last week, British Airways and EasyJet, a low-cost European airline, both canceled all their flights to Sharm airport until January, at the earliest. The next day, another suicide bomber killed seven people in a hotel in the Northern Sinai.
Fabrice Brégier, the chief executive of Airbus, said in a recent interview that the air travel industry had proved it was well equipped to face terror threats.
“Security may put a break in some places but we’ve demonstrated that we knew how to deal with those threats in the past,” Brégier said.
There is a much longer lag when countries experience natural disasters, which can often destroy basic infrastructure. After the 2004 tsunami in Thailand and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, it took from 14 to 22 months for foreign visitor levels to recover, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council study.
After the 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown of the power plants in Fukushima, the number of foreign visitors to Japan dropped by 28 percent. Even so, within two years of the nuclear accident, the number of foreign arrivals had rebounded. By 2013, the number of visitors to Japan exceeded 10 million people for the first time ever, surpassing the prenuclear accident arrival numbers by 20 percent.
Thanks to a weak yen and more flexible visa policies, particularly for Asian visitors, tourists have been visiting in bigger numbers than ever. Japanese government estimates show the country had received 14.5 million visitors by September, already well ahead of last year’s 13.4 million people.
A similar dynamic occurred in the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It took five years for the number of international visits to the United States to exceed their pre-9/11 levels, according to statistics from the U.S. Office of Travel and Tourism.
In recent years, however, efforts to streamline visa applications and entry procedures has led to a large increase in the number of visitors, which jumped to 75 million in 2014, up from 54 million in 2009.
The risk in the United States is for the government to overreact to tragedy by turning back its visitor-friendly policies, according to travel professionals. Authorities should resist calls to freeze the visa waiver program, which streamlines visa applications to the United States and has been one of the key drivers in attracting more tourists in recent years, they said.
“Walking away would be a big mistake,” Scowsill said.
Roger Dow, the president of the U.S. Travel Association, a group that advocates on behalf of the industry, said it was too soon to tell what effect the recent attacks in Paris and elsewhere might have on domestic and international travelers. But he added: “The biggest damage these terrorists can do is getting people to be more antsy.”