The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Travel industry looks to China, India, Brazil for boom Posted: 19 May 2011 03:25 AM PDT  The increasing spending power of Brazilian tourists means that, as they venture further outside their home country, they are becoming a key source of revenue in the travel industry. — AFP pic With an estimated two billion new middle-class consumers expected to come into the markets from those emerging powerhouses over the next two decades, the travel industry sees a potential gold rush ahead. "The growth of China outbound travel is moving at a huge pace — it is about 20 per cent increase every year. And the number of outbound Chinese travellers hit 58 million last year," said David Scowsill, CEO of the World Travel and Tourism Council, an industry promotion group. "And if you look ahead, (with about) 1.6 billion coming out of China and India, they are a huge amount of people coming in with money to burn," he told reporters. The impact of that coming wave is a top topic at a three-day global travel and tourism summit that opens here on Tuesday, drawing CEOs from many of the world's largest travel companies and top tourism officials. The United States is sending Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Valerie Jarrett, a top adviser to President Barack Obama. Mexico's President Fernando Calderon is the guest of honour. Barriers to travel, technological innovation and change, body blows to tourism in quake-struck Japan and the turbulent Middle East also are on the agenda here. But organisers say they want to get government officials and industry leaders thinking about what the arrival of the Chinese, Brazilians, Indians and others from newly affluent countries will mean for their national economies and the international travel business. "We'll ask the attendees whether they are ready to absorb that level of growth," said Scowsill. "Are governments ready with infrastructure build? Are private investors ready to put the investment in, and generally speaking are we ready to absorb that level of growth?" Roger Dow, of the US Travel Association, calls the conflict between the projected surge in demand and lagging infrastructure "a real chicken and egg." "As we build this travel, which will happen, we'll also have to take a real hard look at our infrastructure, our next generation systems for airports, and adding airport capacity," he said. Countries that haven't caught up in time are likely to be cursed with fun-killing bottlenecks and overcrowding as millions of new tourists pour through the global travel system. Ironically, said Scowsill, it is "the developed market leaders that don't fully understand the impact of tourism. They kind of take it for granted in a way that we do not see in some of the developing world." The United States, for instance, has seen little growth over the past decade in the number of long-haul travellers it receives, at a time when the rest of the world has seen an increase of about 40 per cent. Nevertheless, Commerce Department figures out on Tuesday show a strong US rebound in travel and tourism-related exports in 2010 to US$134.4 billion (RM403 billion), after a record US$21 billion, or 15 per cent, drop in 2009. The biggest increase, 18 per cent, came from the Asia-Pacific region. Visitors from China, Singapore, and South Korea increased their tourism related spending by 39 per cent, 31 per cent and 30 per cent, respectively. In the view of the travel industry, the US numbers would be much higher were it not for a system for granting US visas that is so gratingly slow that it is driving away visitors. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States instituted requirements that every visa applicant be interviewed in person by a consular level officer. "The end result is we have seen visa wait times for interviews go up to 100, 120 days in Brazil and China," he said. "In Brazil, there are only four places you can go for a visa interview. In China there are five. So the combination of the huge population, the huge demand, and the need for face-to-face interviews in very few places is what has created the problem," he said. The USTA released a report last week calling for an overhaul of the system. It proposed hiring 400 more consular interviewers, allowing interviews to be done by videoconference, and exploring visa waivers with countries like Brazil. "The Brazilian economy is soaring and people want to spend money, they want to travel. And the two highest groups that spend money are the Chinese and the Brazilian travellers. They outpace other travellers in the world by 25 to 50 per cent per person," said Dow. — AFP-Relaxnews Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
| Teen gamers not scoring enough sleep, study finds Posted: 18 May 2011 06:30 PM PDT  Teens who play a lot of video games are likely to sleep less than eight to nine hours a night, say researchers. — Ankya/shutterstock pic Speaking via teleconference from the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, researchers said that an analysis of data on 16,000 teens also found that youths who reported sleeping less than seven hours a night did not get enough exercise, which could also impact their health. And not getting enough sleep is detrimental for all — and has a particularly negative effect on teens, added Caris Fitzgerald, a psychiatry resident at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences who led the study. A poor night's sleep can bring on a slew of ill effects, including low energy, poor concentration, moodiness, a greater tendency to act on impulse and more suicidal thoughts. Yet only 10 percent of US teens get the recommended hours of shut-eye, according to the study, for which Fitzgerald and her fellow researchers analysed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2009 Youth Risk Behaviour Survey. Because teens have "accelerated demands for growth and memory retention, very vital things with regard to the teen in their overall success," getting sufficient sleep is even more important for them, Fitzgerald said. But they also struggle to do so more than adults. "When it comes to teens, they have a lot of factors that affect them, from an ever greater quest for independence reflected by later bedtime; to expectations from parents and peers — like texting in the middle of the night," said Fitzgerald. Teens' circadian rhythms don't help them in their quest for sleep either. Their body rhythms put them on a schedule where they like to stay up late and sleep in each morning. "But unfortunately the rest of society is not on that schedule and school is still going to start at 8:00 am," Fitzgerald said. The researchers were unable to conclude there was a cause-effect relationship between sleep and online gaming or sport, but Fitzgerald pointed to "some evidence that reducing media exposure and increasing physical activity could increase the amount teens sleep." The study did have one piece of good news for teens: watching television does not appear to affect sleep time. — AFP/Relaxnews Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
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