Airlines evacuating tourists, A hotel cordoned off, Travel bans in place - Are we at war? And is our enemy ourselves or pigs? Yeoh Siew Hoon tries to come to grips with the latest scare to affect tourism.

Humour being the best defence against fear, there have been a lot of jokes circulating lately about the swine flu, one of which is the cartoon in Naked Surfer.

Actually I feel sorry for all the piggies in the world to have this latest scare bug named after them when actually, according to all the reports I have read – and hell, there's a lot of suddenly knowledgeable people out there who know their swine from their swain – this bug actually combines swine, chicken and human strains.

So out of sympathy for Miss Piggy and her kind, the new flu has been renamed the A/H1N1 flu virus, also known as human swine flu.

Yes, I can see us having conversations like this:

"You know, the A-Slash-H-One-N-One flu virus?"

"Oh you mean the bloody swine flu?"

I guess the good news is because of our experience with the SARS crisis of 2003, we are more prepared and I feel that real people are less fearful than the media seems determined to make us.

Airlines in Asia have not reported massive cancellations like they did in 2003. I think real people have other problems to worry about like finding a job or having to deal with a reduced income or trying to manage their cash flow.

The bad news is it's the authorities who have become more fearful – China sending planes to evacuate their citizens from Mexico which got the Mexicans hopping mad and retaliating, blanket travel bans on destinations and last week, shutting down an entire hotel in Hong Kong and quarantining its guests.

I can't imagine what the poor guests are going through. I remember the voluntary quarantine I had to put myself through in 2003 when I flew to Hong Kong during SARS.

It was bad enough being quarantined at home, imagine being locked in a hotel in a foreign city for seven days.

According to this report, "A Room With a Flu: Dispatches From a Hong Kong Hotel", guests have resigned themselves to their fate but you've got to wonder whether it's an over-reaction by a government bent on proving that it is serious about battling the virus this time after all the criticisms it got for its mishandling of SARS.

Imagine being the general manager of the Metropark. "Welcome, sir. Please make yourself at home and we mean that, literally." (Incidentally, my dentist made the observation that hotels named "Metro" seemed to always be at the centre of the flu storm – during SARS, it was Metropole, now it's Metropark, he said.)

The sad news is, the images of guests being shut up in a hotel – which sends out precisely the opposite image of what a hotel stay is supposed to convey – have scared many travellers off. Meetings have been cancelled.

Preferred Hotels Group postponed its regional meeting scheduled for Hong Kong next week. It cited "the large number of cancellations and concern over the recent global media coverage of the H1N1 virus" and says it will reschedule the meeting.

VisitBritain is however going ahead with its Destination Britain & Irelant Showcase, to which I say, jolly good show. It sends out the right signal at a time when the industry needs more leadership by example.

Truth is, according to someone who travelled to Hong Kong this week, "things are reassuringly normal" in Hong Kong.

"If I hadn't been watching out for the scanners at the airport, I wouldn't have noticed them. It seems to be business as usual."

Well, I am headed there on Sunday and will tell you all about it.

Then I've also been learning all about the WHO alert systems. Apparently, level 6 is the highest possible and as I write this, the who's who at WHO were debating among themselves whether to go to 6.

Raising the alert level however "means only that transmission has been observed and says nothing about the virulence of the new virus". Those are two separate things, according to Assistant Director-General Dr Keiji Fukuda – which makes it as clear as pigswill to me.

And here's another piece of pigswill to me. We are told that there's no danger in catching the virus from eating pork. Then why then are they banning pork imports?

At least 20 countries have banned imports of pork from either Mexico, the United States or Canada – or all three. Experts said the bans are beginning to put a dent in the global pork trade, which is worth $26 billion a year.

According to one report, "This is despite health stressing there is no danger in importing or eating pork, despite the occurrence of a small outbreak of the flu in a herd of pigs in Alberta, Canada. That incident is believed to have been caused by a Canadian farmer who infected the pigs after his return from Mexico."

Said Dr Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "It may be that pigs have more to fear from people than people have to fear from pigs."

That's the wisest thing anyone's ever said in this whole sorry, swiny affair.

Yeoh Siew Hoon, one of Asia's most respected travel editors and commentators, writes a regular column on news, trends and issues in the hospitality industry for 4Hoteliers.com.

Siew Hoon, who has covered the tourism industry in Asia/Pacific for the past 20 years, runs SHY Ventures Pte Ltd. Her other writings can be found at www.thetransitcafe.com

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www.webintravel.com - October 20-23, 2009 Suntec Convention Centre, Singapore