Business and pleasure

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – With SARS and a resurgent al-Qaeda to worry about, international travel has become such a hassle that many people would rather stay home and see the world through the eyes of Hollywood and Discovery Channel.

This is bad news for the travel industry, whose woes have been piling up for about four years now. It’s also bad news for nations that rely heavily on revenues from the international travel industry. That includes the Philippines, and practically every nation doing business in a globalized world.

How do you entice people to resume shopping in Hong Kong ($100 for a package of three days, two nights, yet still no takers)? How do you encourage people to take an international flight that could have a deadly virus lurking in the air vents or a passenger preparing to destroy the plane in a suicide operation?

People would rather stay home. Any place that requires activation of roaming service is too much trouble.

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In Scandinavia, governments are redefining tourism and giving a new dimension to travel. Basically the tack is to mix leisure trips with business and a learning experience. In this city for example, the local government has a Department of Protocol and International Affairs, which works with the Scandinavian Tourist Board (STB) to lure visitors to Sweden.

Soren Leerskov, STB’s Tokyo-based regional director for Asia, wants a comprehensive approach to travel. His idea is for tourists in Scandinavia to go beyond sightseeing and endless shopping and picture taking. Instead government agencies prepare travel packages that incorporate in leisure trips an opportunity to learn something about Scandinavia – its history, natural wealth, culture and democratic system.

This means something more than mere lectures about Stockholm by knowledgeable guides. Instead the city offers "technical visits," which gives small groups of visitors a chance to learn about particular aspects of city life.

The city’s project coordinator for these technical visits, Anna-Karin Freidh, told me they have so far put together programs covering social services, care for the disabled, health care, education, the environment, information technology, city planning and even how Stockholm is governed.

When a participant in these technical visits is taken to the Stockholm City Hall, for example, he will learn about how the city is run. At the same time, he will get a briefing on the famous Swede who developed dynamite, Alfred Nobel, and the prizes in his name that are given here (except for the Peace Prize, which is handed out in Oslo, Norway).

In between, the participant can look at a typical formal table setting for the night of the awarding ceremonies for the Nobel prizes, held every December at City Hall, complete with napkins and chocolate wrapped in gold foil featuring Nobel’s face. The participant can pose for a picture before the massive wall painting of the Bråvalla Battle – a battle between Old Norse kings. The artwork features a mosaic of glass pieces covered with gold leaf.

Sweden does not have the dramatic contrasts that give the Norwegian landscape grandeur. But this country has its own natural charm, and one of the best environmental programs in the world. The STB wants tourists to learn about how Sweden has dealt with vehicle emissions and air pollution.

Stockholm, one of the cleanest cities in the world, is also promoting visits to an "ecological suburb" called Hammarby Sjostad – an environment-friendly development project that could serve as a model for the rest of the world.

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Stockholm has been offering technical visits for several years. But Freidh said travel agencies were tapping the same institutions over and over for the same programs, exhausting the institutions. So the Swedish government asked the STB to coordinate the technical visits.

"We defined all the products available and which are in demand, and then prepared the package," Soren said. Germany and Australia have similar programs, he said, but on a much smaller scale. The STB program eventually covered not only Stockholm but also the entire country as well as Denmark and Norway.

Most of the technical visitors come from Japan and South Korea, Soren said. Scandinavia is not a cheap travel destination, but some visitors are sponsored by their governments. These include visitors from China, Eastern Europe and South America.

Now the STB is exploring the market in Southeast Asia, starting with the Philippines.

These days Soren is also toying with the idea of taking the Scandinavian approach to tourism to another level — linking it with official development assistance. It’s his idea of spreading the good word about the Scandinavian way of life.

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Meanwhile, the STB has Al-Qaeda to worry about. For now blame is being heaped on the Scandinavian press for blowing up the threat in Norway. (Why does that sound familiar?) Soren is still studying an appropriate response by the STB. "Of course all of these things have to be taken seriously," he said.

Terrorism, as we know, can defeat even the boundless enthusiasm and best efforts of a national salesman like Richard Gordon. The Scandinavians I met seemed resigned to the fact that one day, terrorism would reach their shores, and possibly even SARS, too. Such are the risks of globalization.

So far our local tourist destinations have reaped a windfall from the SARS scare. Peripatetic Filipinos, grounded by pestilence and terror, are learning more about their country.

But disaster in the travel industry, as we have seen post-9/11, dampens the global economy, which in turn means fewer people with enough disposable income to travel anywhere, even within their own country.

To survive, nations must show that they are doing their best to address any threat. Nations must also develop new approaches that will compel people to leave the relative safety of their homes to see other places. Scandinavia is not sitting around waiting for fallout from terror or SARS.

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LIMITS OF TECHNOLOGY: My columns from abroad were filed in haste, sometimes from computers whose symbols I could not understand. So please pardon any mistakes. There’s still a big room for improvement in information technology when it comes to travelers’ needs.