Ep 289: War in Iran & Lebanon Raises New Questions for South East Asian Travel Economies: Pre-Start the Week with The South East Asia Travel Show

“We don’t know when this war is going to end, but already we are seeing a great degree of uncertainty return to travel and tourism in South East Asia.” One week after the US and Israel began attacking Iran and Lebanon, what are the short-term outcomes for travel in the region - and what are the risks waiting up ahead? This week, Gary is in Seoul and he asks some of the structural questions the travel industry will be thinking about as a major economic shock looms. Is connective global air travel too centralised? Will Lufthansa’s new Frankfurt-KL service stimulate more direct connectivity between European and South East Asian markets? How resilient is Vietnam’s tourism sector beneath the bullish forecasts? Is now the right time to transition away from visitor arrivals and tourist spending as the competitive metrics? Will travel conference programmers take geo-strategy and geo-economics more seriously and start discussing them in the same detail as AI and sustainability? Above all, are regional travel economies implementing the risk mitigation strategies they should have been preparing during Covid?