NEW YORK -- A West Coast operator with a 160-member pilgrimage
group booked to depart for Israel on Oct. 6 will leave as planned,
despite the escalating violence between Israelis and Palestinians,
the firm's president said.
The company, Portland, Ore.-based Ya'lla Tours USA, so far had
no cancellations from its pilgrimage group, which hails from San
Antonio, said president Ronen Paldi.
He added that his company had several FITs already in Israel
when the clashes erupted in Jerusalem's Old City several days
ago.
Israel's Ministry of Tourism said it expects the situation "to
calm down in a very short time...and [we] do not see any reason to
avoid any arrivals."
Yehuda Shen, director of the Northeast U.S. region of the Israel
Government Tourist Office and the ministry's deputy tourism
commissioner for North America, added that there were 200,000
tourists in Israel when the crisis began.
Violence also has been reported in Nazareth and in nearby
Galilee, but deluxe hotels contacted there reported no negative
impact or exodus of guests.
Oshra Gabay, an Israeli-born travel agent who works for Valerie
Wilson Travel in New York, offered a tale with a twist. She booked
a group of New York businessmen on a peace-process factfinding
mission to the Middle East in late September.
The group represented a philanthropic organization that donates
money to Israel, and its members met with the leaders of Egypt,
Israel and Gaza -- including Yasser Arafat, Hosni Mubarak and Ehud
Barak, said Gabay, who handled most of their travel arrangements
but did not know the name of their organization.
"They were trying to [ascertain] whether the peace process was
weeks away [from success] or a year away or what...now they know,"
she said, noting that the group returned to the U.S. just before
the fighting broke out.
Gabay said she has many high-tech business travel clients who
routinely travel between New York and Tel Aviv.
"When something like this happens, the build-up of the story in
the [U.S.] media is so great that clients get frantic and they
[usually cancel.] They are afraid the airports will close and they
will be stuck there," she said.
"But when I call my own family in Israel, they are not nearly as
panicked...maybe they're just more laid-back about these kinds of
situations," Gabay said.
Generally, U.S. tour operators were biding their time.
According to Eileen Lowe Hart, vice president of marketing for
Isram World of Travel here, the firm has a surge of clients booked
for mid-October but has not been approached by any of them about
cancellations.
"We are, of course, monitoring the situation on a day-to-day
basis," she said.
If conditions call for cancellations, Isram's policy is to apply
the deposits paid to future trips to any of its destinations around
the world.
Shuly Kustanowitz and Donna Tunney contributed to this
report.