Right across Asia, from the sun-soaked beaches of Bali, Boracay and the Maldives, to the cool highlands and mountains of Nepal, India and Bhutan, thousands of tourists are still stranded because of cancelled flights and closed borders due to the current coronavirus pandemic.
UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) statistics indicate that close to 400 million tourists visit Asia each year. Assuming that not a lot of Chinese tourists — who account for about 20 percent of that figure — were travelling in March (because many countries had already shut their borders to tourists from China), that would mean that in any one week about six million non-Chinese tourists would be on the road in Asia.
Taking a very conservative view that perhaps 4 out of 5 tourists had delayed or shortened their trips because of concerns about the pandemic or because their governments were suggesting that they reconsider their travel plans, it is likely that more than one million tourists were in Asia around the first week of March when Asian governments started talking about quarantine lockdowns and closing borders.
Travellers started heading home in early March. Image: © T Watanabe
Over the next two weeks as lockdowns started being implemented and restrictions introduced on inbound tourism, tens of thousands of tourists had to abandon their travel plans and work out the most practical way to shorten their holidays and head home.
Many travellers complained that even when their governments told them it was time to go home, they couldn’t reach their airlines or travel agents to change flights, some airlines had already cancelled flights on them, and borders were closing at transit points making it difficult to rebook flights on alternative routes.
Other travellers were complaining that they were spending up to 10 hours waiting to speak to airline reservations staff, only to be disconnected when they eventually did get through. And emails to the airlines were generating automatic responses advising that they could expect a reply in 14 days.
Trying to rebook flights was a difficult task for many travellers. Image: © Engin Akyurt
My own experience with Qantas trying to cancel a flight booked with them for during the lockdown period replicated that experience. I could not reach them on the phone despite many hours on hold in the middle of the night, and emails only generated auto-responses advising that reservations staff would be in touch “as soon as possible”. That was more than two weeks ago, and I’ve still not heard from them.
Many travellers reported little success in trying to reach companies through which they had bought travel insurance. Those that did get through were often advised that their insurance didn’t cover rescheduling of flights caused by pandemics. For others, trying to speak to anyone by phone became a frustrating and fruitless task.
So most travellers have had no choice but to ‘abandon’ previous bookings and hope they get their money back at some time in the future, and book whatever itineraries they could from the countries where they were stranded through local travel agents or other airlines’ websites (if they hadn’t crashed).
Cancelled flights at Japan’s Narita airport in late March. Image: © David Astley
So back to the original question. How many tourists are still stranded in Asia?
Around 18,000 tourists were stranded in Sri Lanka as at 26 March according to the Tamil Guardian. As at 11 April the Malaysian news agency Bernama was reporting that 80 Malaysians were still stranded there which would suggest that significant numbers of other nationalities have not made it out of the country as well.
In the last week of March, Time magazine estimated that there were up to 10,000 tourists stranded in Nepal, and since then there have only been about 10 international flights a day leaving Kathmandu, so it is likely that about half that number are still stranded in the country.
Further south, a story on Australia’s ABC News last Friday by their South Asia correspondent in New Delhi, James Oaten, quotes 1,300 Australians from a “stranded Australians” Facebook group as having put their names to an email calling on the Australian government to help them get flights home. That was just one nationality and just one email.
Given that (according to the UNWTO) the number of tourists that India receives is about 15 times that of Nepal, the number still in India could be as high as 75,000, but it’s probably less because there are more exit points from India than there are from Nepal.
Looking at it another way, if 1,300 stranded Australians put their name to an email, there were probably at least another couple of hundred who didn’t know about the Facebook group. And as Australians account for about 2.5 percent of inbound tourist arrivals (excluding arrivals from Bangladesh as tourists from that country can return overland) there could have been around 60,000 tourists of all nationalities still in India in the second week of April.
To be conservative, let’s discount that figure by half to allow for the fact that travelling back to Europe through the Middle East was easier than travelling east to the rest of Asia, Australia or New Zealand, so a reasonable guesstimate of the number of tourists still stranded in India would be around 30,000.
That figure stacks up proportionately with the 2,500 tourists reported to be stranded in Bali as at the end of March and 4,500 stranded in the Philippines the week before.
So projecting the figure of 30,000 stranded tourists in India to a whole of Asia figure, given that India accounts for about five percent of tourist arrivals in Asia, the total number of stranded tourists on the continent could still be around 600,000.
If that figure seems high, consider the fact that on 7 April the Russian TASS news agency reported that there were 20,800 Russians stranded in Thailand alone. That’s just one nationality in one country.
Whatever the real figure is (and nobody knows for sure) it’s still a lot of people who can’t get home, many of whom have run out of money and are relying on family and friends to send them money for accommodation and food. But some who may not be able to rely on family support are destitute, and are relying on help from local people in the countries where they are stranded.
If you or a friend has a story to tell about where and why you are stranded, or a story about the difficulties and costs of getting home from where you were holidaying, please drop me a note via the contact form on the ‘Contact Us’ page of this website (click on the ‘hamburger’ symbol in the top left of the home page) because we’d like to report on these experiences. I would particularly be interested to hear from any older travellers who are stranded – especially those who might have been on an extended post-retirement trip to Asia.