01:00 AM EST on Sunday, January 23, 2005

BY MARJIE LAMBERT
Knight Ridder Newspapers

It is the images of ruin that even now, nearly a month later, linger in the mind and continue to define the event: fragments of wood strewn on a beach where a hotel once stood, satellite photos of barren land where a town was swept away.

Yet despite the destruction that tsunamis inflicted on some of Asia's coastal communities on Dec. 26, many resorts are open and welcoming guests.

"We're barely affected. Please don't cancel your plans," a representative of a hotel in Phuket, Thailand, said in an e-mail to Karla Bookman shortly after a tsunami swept across parts of that beach resort.

Bookman, a Miami woman traveling through Asia during a break from law school in New York, still felt a certain queasiness at the prospect of vacationing at the scene of a catastrophe, so she changed her reservations from Phuket to Koh Samui, an island on Thailand's east coast unaffected by the tsunamis.

"I had the feeling that it might be a little bizarre to be in a resort where people had disappeared or died, that it might be strange to be around the pool sipping a drink," she said.

The tsunamis struck at the region's tourism industries, especially in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Maldives, bringing devastation to some places and leaving others untouched. Thousands of tourists were among the more than 175,000 killed.

In other countries, most of the destruction was not in areas popular with tourists.

The eight Asian countries affected had 29 million foreign tourists in 2003 and $22 billion in tourism revenues, the World Tourism Organization said.

How much was tourism affected? And how long will recovery take? The answer depends on the particular communities affected, the extent of the damage, the condition of the roads and other infrastructure, and the traveling public's perceptions.

Many hotels with minor damage have already reopened or expect to finish repairs this spring. Others, though, were destroyed and will take a year or longer to rebuild.

Tourist officials fear it is the devastation that people will remember.

"There is . . . a gulf between the perception people have of the event, owing to the considerable coverage given to it by the media . . . and the expected consequences for the development of world tourism," the World Tourism Organization said in a statement.

"Although there is great hardship now because of the havoc wreaked on lives and property, tourism is expected to recover in the short term and be only slightly affected during 2005."

Some pleas from hotel managers and tour operators are plaintive.

"We face lots of cancellations in January and February," the general manager of the Krabi Seaview Resort wrote on a Thai tourism Web site.

"We are fully operational. Please try to convince your clients, friends, relatives, colleagues that they can only help to overcome this disaster by not canceling their reservation. Everybody here, especially Thai people, need to keep their job and need to earn money to survive!"

Anxious about public perceptions, people in the travel industry were upbeat in their assessments.

"Officials expect Phuket to be restored in a very short time," said June Farrell, vice president of international public relations for Marriott, whose resort received some ground-floor damage that was largely repaired within a week.

"Thailand has a good infrastructure. They are committed to restoring everything right away. Tourism is a key component of their gross domestic product, so it's in their best interests," Farrell said.

THAILAND: Thai resort areas hit hardest are Phuket, Kaho Lak and Phi Phi. On Phuket, though, some beaches were ravaged while others received little or no damage, and beachgoers quickly returned to stretches of sand that were clear of debris.

"I've been in touch with a lot of tour operators and they've had very few cancellations," said Joan Schechter, marketing manager for the Tourist Authority of Thailand.

"Eighty percent is back up -- hotels, restaurants, sight seeing. Kaho Lak and Phi Phi are the slowest. Maybe one or two hotels are operational, but there is so much devastation on those islands that people probably would want to pick someplace else."

Like Bookman, some tourists who had planned to visit damaged areas changed their itinerary to include another Thai destination, she said.

Even so, the Pacific Asia Travel Association said that tourist arrivals at Bangkok's international airport dropped 27 percent immediately after the tsunamis hit. Lost tourism revenues could be as much as $1 billion in 2005, officials said.

ELSEWHERE: The government of Sri Lanka reported that many hotels along the southern and eastern coastline were in disrepair and not operating normally. Government officials said tourism accounts for almost 5 percent of the gross domestic product and predicted the impact of the tsunamis on the tourist industry would be extensive.

In the Maldives, where tourism accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the gross domestic product, the impact on tourism will be enormous, tourism officials said.

Hotel occupancy, usually approaching 100 percent this time of year, was down by half. Of the nation's 87 resorts, 64 were fully operational, said Mustafa Lutfi, the minister of tourism. Six were badly damaged and expected to take at least six months to rebuild; the others should be back in operation sooner.

Airlines: Responding to a drop in ticket sales, some airlines cut flights to tsunami-affected areas. Several airlines, including Singapore and Northwest, said they would temporarily allow travelers with tickets for travel to affected countries to change or cancel their plans without paying a fee, depending on the timing of their trips.

Cruises: Cruise lines with stops scheduled for the region -- including Fort-Lauderdale-based Silversea Cruises, which planned to dock in Phuket in mid-March, and Seabourn Cruise Line, which has a stop scheduled for Sri Lanka in April -- said they would evaluate closer to their landing dates.

In other cases, the decision has already been made. Seabourn Cruise Line has canceled a scheduled Jan. 18 stop in Phuket but will stop there March 1, said Bruce Good, director of public relations for the Miami-based line.

"Apparently a lot of the infrastructure we use in Phuket isn't that affected, but they are so in the middle of cleanup that we wouldn't want to add to their problems," Good said.

One element of the infrastructure that the cruise line uses: elephants. The stop in Phuket includes a visit to an elephant farm, where passengers can ride the beasts. But these are working elephants, Good said, and they "are hard at work cleaning up the beaches."

If you might go

For more information on tourism-related tsunami news:

The Pacific Asia Travel Association's Web site, www.pata.org, has news, country-specific updates, information on relief efforts.

The Thai tourism Web site, www.sawadee.com, has information on the status of individual hotels and other lodgings in areas hit by the tsunamis.

The World Tourism Organization's Web site, www.world-tourism.org, has country-specific updates and news about the recovery effort.

The International Council of Tourism Partners' Web site, www.tourismpartners.org, has news, country-specific updates and contact numbers.