A vacation in tsunami's wake?

Their honeymoon was booked for Dec. 28 with a stay on the idyllic island of Phuket. Then the tsunami hit. The New York couple agonized about whether to go, drawing up long lists of pros and cons.

"It was a very tough call," says Heather Dolstra, their travel agent in Washington, D.C. Their greatest concern, she says, was whether they would be overwhelmed emotionally by what they saw. In the end, they left for Bangkok as scheduled but changed the island portion of their trip.

As news coverage brought the devastation and loss of life around the Indian basin into everyone's living-room, many tourists with holidays booked to Asia struggled with whether it is prudent, helpful, or even ethical to vacation in disaster-hit regions.

Photos of European tourists sunning themselves as tractors claw away debris in the background smack of insensitivity. Yet staying away might not be the best answer either.

"You have to compare whether it would make any difference to their lives if you didn't go ahead ... to the difference it would make to their lives if you did," says Vani Borooah, professor of applied economics at the University of Ulster. If you didn't go, it wouldn't benefit them one bit, he says.

While the economic argument may seem irrefutable, he acknowledges that it is "slightly ghoulish" going to a place that has been devastated. "The houses are flattened and people are hungry and thirsty. It is physically repugnant." But on balance, he says, going ahead is the right thing to do.

The US State Department doesn't seem to agree. On its website, it encourages Americans to defer all nonessential travel to the affected areas. At the same time, the Tourism Authority of Thailand and the Sri Lanka Tourist Board are strongly urging tourists to follow through on vacation plans, as are many tour operators and local hoteliers.

"One of the most heart-warming effects of this tragedy has been the reaction of the foreign visitors," the chairman of the Sri Lanka Tourist Board said, according to hospitality.net. "[They] have insisted to continue their holidays collaborating with the cleaning up, or travelling to unaffected areas of the countries, thus contributing to the early recovery of tourism."

Local papers in Thailand, like the Phuket Gazette, urge tourists not to cancel, pointing out that residents will have to deal not only with their grief but with unemployment, too.

"The worst punishment would be not to go back," René-Marc Chikli, the president of the French Association of Tour Operators, said. "If we succeed in re-employing just one person, we keep a family alive."

For many of these coastal regions, tourism is the powerhouse of the economy. In Thailand, for instance, tourism makes up 6 percent of gross domestic product. So in the first three days of January a shudder of a different sort was felt when international arrivals at Bangkok Airport dropped 27 percent.

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