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March 9, 2005

Terrorism and the Travel Industry

Moderator: David Unger
Panellists: Francesco Frangialli, Pedro Argüelles, Isabel Aguilera, William Fell, Victor Aguado

In the panel Terrorism and the Travel Industry, the participants highlighted the severe impact of major terrorist attacks on the transport and tourism industry. While all sectors of the industry were affected, air travel had suffered disproportionately and continued to be the most vulnerable. The implementation of new security measures was costly, but unavoidable. One panellist stressed the need to integrate and co-ordinate the actions of all stakeholders, and suggested that modern technology in the form of large databases could offer a solution. The panel was organised in collaboration with the Instituto de Empresa.

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Transcription / Transcripción


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David Unger
[…] since 9/11 involved airplanes and 3/11 involved trains and probably involved hotels. Terrorism is of course not a new issue for any European country. You’ve been living with it for decades, but it seems to have taken a new form and new forms of perceptions among customers of the travel industry.

We have here a distinguished panel of experts covering the range. We have to my left Isabel Aguilera […], Francisco Frangialli and Victor Aguado, Pedro Miguel Argüelles and William Fell at the far end.

I think to start out I’m going to ask each of the speakers in turn to briefly talk about how they see the impact of terrorism on the part of the industry they’re most familiar with, if they deal with what is new about it, what of it might be specific to particular locations or not, what of it might come and go in time kind of cycles, and what is enduring and we can also start to address some of the measures that have been undertaken both to improve security and to improve the confidence of the traveling public and assess their adequacy and what else might be taken on.

It’s your turn, Isabel, to start us off. By the way, I’m not Roger Collis. I’m David Unger and I’m the senior foreign affairs editorial writer of the New York Times.

Isabel Aguado
Thank you, David. The fact that terrorism attacks tourism interests is no news and it’s a logical consequence of the relevance of tourism for the life of nowadays. A tourist and tourism is a signal of freedom in today’s time and therefore terror wants to attack that freedom.

On the other hand, tourism is one of the main sources of economical power in the modern industry and it represents in many countries, such as Spain, one of the most important parts of the economy, and a very important part of the employment of the country. Therefore the impact of an attack to that industry is really relevant and is always reflected in media. Therefore tourism is one of the main targets and especially because of those two reasons, but also because what they follow or what they pursue is to make us change our lives and not to advance in our consequences or in our achievement in life, for a better life.

What should be the answer? It’s very difficult to have an answer for this and to have a pragmatic answer because sometimes when we have an answer it is romantic and we don’t realize how tough it is for the people suffering in the first person. My two answers to that is only we need to continue. I think that the best answer for a terror attack on any interest is to continue our lives. They can not get their goals. We need to continue and we need to continue fighting. I know that is tough and tougher if you suffer it in the first person.

The second one is to follow all the rules, as any other citizen, as any other company, as any other industry to follow all rules and all legislation about it as a contributor to make it better for all of us. It sometimes represents a lot of training, lots of investment and a lot of inconvenience, but it’s the contribution to the social life that the industry, the tourist industry can do. Certainly NH hotels, and I’m sure all my competitors and all other industries, are doing and should do the same.

This is a sad story but we can also start any date and see why Spain being part of terrorist territory for many many years, we’ve been having increasing touristic industry in the past years but suddenly suffering more in the recent past since September 11th attacks and of course March 11th.

I don’t want to go inside a debate of having different classes of terrorism, even though I know that that was one of the statements of yesterday in this forum, because my point of view is that any kind of terrorism is terrorism, but it’s true that something has changed and the vulnerability feeling has changed when we consider that it’s not a local effect and that “it also might happen to me.” The media impact and the vulnerability effect has been completely different since it is not a local and reduced politically concerning two different contending issues when it becomes general, when it becomes something global.

Once again the bad effects of globalization has resulted in this kind of discussions and in this kind of different positioning against that, so I leave this kind of consideration and this kind of thoughts to the audience and I’m very happy to be here to discuss and to contribute to this.

David Unger
Before we move on to the next panelist, we’re here in Madrid on the anniversary week of 3/11 and I’m just wondering from the perspective of the hotel industry, what kind of impact there was and how it looks a year later.

Isabel Aguilera
It was really, I’m not discovering anything new, it was really shocking. Completely shocking. The economical impact for the hotels in Madrid was big. Everything changed because we started to review all our security plans, we started to review all our physical evacuation plans, we started to put in our training plans how to react against all this kind of effect, even though all this was included in the normal studies, as some of you might know, in the tourism industry and in touristic studies but we were reinforcing those feelings. We also were very much concerned and we are an international company.

We thought that it was going to be like a similar effect to the September 11th and that was not so much, to be honest. However, the internal tourism, Spanish people coming to Spanish hotels, was the most affected one and of course all the little logistics things and all the little administrative things that we have to do for control, for police requirements, had been reinforced. And that is taking us some more work, sometimes extra stuff and of course, some extra investment which at the end is something that we are sure to be conscious of. This is a private company, we are listed, we need to have profits. We are paying as well and that is what the terror wanted to achieve. We share this with all our colleagues but at the end that is what has represented, has had an impact in our P and L.

It has had an impact in the psychology of our people and in the training of our people and in the preparation of our people especially because NH Hotels offered hotel rooms for the victims and the families, the relatives of the victims in the event, and believe me, I was with the people answering phones at the central reservation system. What those people listened to and they had to attend was really out of their normal job and out of what they were prepared for. We asked for help for some psychologists and so on, and they gave them some arguments and we did the best that we could, but it was having really an impact on the personal and professional lives and on the company for the future and in that moment.

David Unger
We move on to Francisco Frangialli who though based in Madrid, I think can give us a global overview, and tell us a little bit about your perspective and what the World Tourism Organization does.

Francisco Frangialli
Thank you. My name is Francisco Frangialli and I’m the secretary-general of the World Tourism Organization, which is the specialized agency of the United Nations and our specialty is based here and has headquarters here in Madrid.

I’m pleased to take part in this panel but I prefer the name in the title in Spanish rather than in English. For us it’s a problem for the transport and the travel, but also for the tourism sector.

This development of terrorism has been part of a global problem. Sometimes it’s difficult to make the distinction. Since 2001, nothing has been spared to this industry. We had the economic downturn in 2001; the shock of the 11th of September; terrorist attacks against tourists, hotels; but also a lot of natural disasters: hurricanes in the Caribbean; the last one is the tsunami in South Asia; and maybe the most important has been the SARS epidemic in Asia; not referring to the war anyhow, and so sometimes it’s difficult to make a distinction between the consequences of one or the other of these phenomena.

This series of shocks has demonstrated two things that can seem a little bit contradictory but I think both of them are true. One is that tourism is very vulnerable. When you have an attack, especially against a group of tourists, it can have an enormous impact and it is a reason why these groups are targeting the tourists.

At the same time this sector is very, very resilient. In spite of all that I have mentioned, if you take the years 2001, 2002 and 2003, we had more or less a zero growth in the number of international arrivals. Around 700 million arrivals, a small drop in 2001 and 2003, a small increase in 2002, and a very very strong rebound in 2004. Last year we had an increase of 10 percent in international arrivals. Now we have 760 million international arrivals. International arrivals in our statistics is someone who’s spending at least one overnight in another country. So, vulnerability and resilience, both things at the same time.

The second point I would like to make is that a lot has deepened under perception. When a group of tourists is really the target, like what happened in Luxor or what happened in Bali or in Mombasa or in Java, you can have an enormous impact, especially if people are in a feeling of uncertainty. If the government doesn’t play the card of transparency, then the impact can be used. It happened for instance for Tunisia after the attack in Java.

When it’s an attack against a city like what happened in Madrid one year ago, it’s different because it’s not perceived outside as something related to tourism so I fully understand and share what has been said. It has a strong impact for the industry here in Madrid especially because of the extra costs for the hotel industry but in terms of frequentation for Spain, the impact has been rather limited and the summer season in Spain has not been significantly affected by what happened on the 11th of March.

Sometimes the consequences of this attack, terrorist attacks, can be very very surprising. I take for instance two examples. After the 11th of September, the Americans, most of them, stopped traveling abroad. They remained within the boundaries of the United States and this was something which happened in many parts of the world. So there’s been a very negative impact, for instance, for the Caribbean. The Caribbean is a very safe region, at least for the time being, but the impact was very negative because of the lack of American travel.

Another very surprising consequence is what happened in the Middle East with the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the way it’s awash with terrorism. We could have thought that it would have been the worst region in the world. It has been the best. A strong increase, why?, many reasons: less Americans, less Europeans traveling to Middle East destinations, but more Russians and more Asians. But the most important has been that people from the Gulf region, from Saudi Arabia, they have been traveling within the Middle East. This explains the boom you can see in Dubai, and Shamel Shek and Kapta, everywhere, in Bahai, and in the Middle East. It is a very surprising consequence of this strange situation.

The last point I would like to make in this intervention is that the major obstacles which have come up with this new situation have been what I would call non-economic obstacles. Security measures – they are double-edged. They reassure the travelers, and I suppose the other panelists will be much more competent for me to describe that, at the same time, they are an impediment to travel especially when the human resources are not put in place to accompany them.

Strengthening of the immigration rules, the visas policy. You know, for instance, the visa has always been an obstacle to tourism but now we have a lot of qualitative change that we are noting, especially multiplication of short works, decisions of traveling taken at the last minute. If you take a decision at the last minute and if you need a visa to go to a destination, you will change to another one and the use of Internet facilitates that.

Maybe the most important is the multiplication of travel advisories put in place by governments dissuading people to travel to one country or another. We are really facing a new situation in the past three years. Tourism is a part of this new situation.

David Unger
Thank you very much for that. Victor Aguado maybe will take our focus back to Europe and European travel and how you see it from Eurocontrol and how some of these things that we’ve heard about play out: Americans staying away, or resilience and how that looks from where you sit.

Victor Aguado
Thanks very much. I’m very happy to contribute this morning to this discussion. Eurocontrol is an international organization, a European organization with 34 member states, European states and includes also the European communities. Our mission is to provide the European skies with safety. We are talking today about security and the Spanish seguridad is both things and I would like to link those at the end if possible.

First of all let me tell you that, yes, terrorism is not new. It’s not new in different states, it’s not new to aviation. It’s interesting to note that the statistics that we have for many years in the past, we have 95 actions for unlawful interference. Even in 1931, in the 40’s, in the 50’s, in the 60’s, all together until today there’s an accumulation of 1000 actions of unlawful interference against aviation. Those actions had different dimension than what we have today.

In the beginning the consequences were totally different. It was in the 60’s that those actions increased, and then the international community reacted and reacted in the forum of the International Civil Aviation Organization. They developed what is referred to as Annex 17 to the Chicago Convention, by which aviation takes measures on how to regulate security in air travel. That’s 1974.

1974 is an old paradigm compared to what we have today. What is the new paradigm that we have today? Yes, it is September 11th, a new dimension. It is completely different. Nobody thought that this could happen. I could take even the 11th of March, even if it is not air travel, but it is a new dimension, the action against transport. Also I would recall the two Russian planes that were bombed by suicidal attempts very recently.

Those are three major shocks to the transportation system. Let me tell you that as targets for terrorists, I would say that, of course, they are obvious targets. Clearly identified could be the energy distribution network, the telecommunications network and then the transport network. From the transport network, yes, railroads, of course maritime, but then we come to air travel.

I’ve got to pick up the reference that Francisco made before. Air travel is a little bit more fragile. It has an international dimension. Here if we compare a big, tremendous, brutal bombing here in Madrid, it was in a railroad. We can just imagine this in a major international airport in Europe. What would be the consequences?

Just to give you an indication, some years ago, we had a strike in one of the Balearic islands, of bus drivers. The bus drivers were on strike on the island and that had a major impact on the airports all around Europe: in London, in Frankfurt, in Paris. Because what happens in one airport has consequences for the network. So you have a major attempt at one of those air transport nodes over the network, it would have tremendous impact on the rest.

I will not go into the importance of tourism on travel in the economy, but let me tell you that in September 11th, there is one of the major shocks. The US was able to take, in air travel, a major decision. It is to block the air space, to bring the airplanes down and land them. And then the question that you ask is what about Europe? Are we able to do something like this? That’s a good question.

What we experienced on September 11th, and this is from my own experience in Europe, is that once we received the message from the U.S., from Eurocontrol we were able to stop all traffic going to the U.S. in less than four minutes. This is all traffic from the continent going to the U.S. And why is that? Because we had in Europe only one center that deals with flow management in which we receive all the flight plans and that we allocate slots for that travel. We are connected with every single nation in the U.K. and continent, we are connected with every single air traffic control, we are connected with the towers, we are connected with the airlines. Because we have that and because we use telecommunications technologies, highly developed, and we have highly developed procedures, we are able to take measures such as that.

What I’m trying to say is that we need to prevent terrorism from the beginning and we have to manage the crisis. Once you have to manage the crisis, you need organizations, you need technologies, and then you need procedures. And in this sense, and if we have time at the end, Europe has taken a lot of the initiatives in this regard. In Eurocontrol, in NATO and also in the European Union, a major activity. I think that for the time being I will come back to these issues. Thank you.

David Unger
Thank you, Victor. I think all transatlantic travelers have noticed the difference in security measures on an international flight that goes to the U.S.A. and an international flight that is between European countries. You talked about the capacity you have to respond in a severe and instantaneous matter so maybe there’s a philosophy at work that explains this difference. Is there? Is my perception an accurate one, that the flights between inter-European cities do not got through some of the kind of rigorous sniffing and individual controls and extra hours of arrival that the transatlantic do? I know that some of that is by order of the U.S. authorities. Do the European authorities consider it not cost-effective?

Victor Aguado
There are different dimensions to security and the issue in Europe is that air travel experienced security a long time ago because moving from one country to another was considered an international flight. Going from one part of the European Union to the other had already incorporated security measures. It probably was not the case within the U.S. as a national flight, and this was experienced in September 11th.

As a matter of fact, the European air travel was already conscious of security and terrorism from the beginning. We have to upgrade much and say that intra-European security measures compare with the transatlantic measures.

David Unger
This point we may come back to. In support of your point on the attack on a major node, I’d point out the thwarted millennium attacks in the United States, the plan was to blow up most of Los Angeles International Airport, and that was a plot that was intercepted in progress, so it’s a very realistic concern.

Pedro Argüelles?

Pedro Argüelles
Thank you, David. In the name of the Boeing company, I’d like to thank the Instituto de la Empresa for inviting us to participate in this panel, which I think is one of the most interesting panels of this event in Madrid.

There’s no question that terrorism has targeted all transport systems as one of the ways to most efficiently destabilize the economic progress of the world. I think that’s their ultimate goal, to create havoc in our lives. Upsetting the economic progress is probably the most efficient way. Upsetting the economic progress in a global manner is probably also the best and if we want to find an example of what represents the globalization of the world, maybe air transport is probably at the top of that list.

Targeting air traffic, I think, is obviously a very attractive target for terrorism. September 11th is a sad experience of what they can do, in just one day destroying the growth of that industry and destroying the growth of many, many lives for many years.

We are today beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s taken four years to recover the levels of transport, air transport in the world, from figures at the end of year 2000 to figures at the end of year 2004. We’re now recovering from that. That’s a good example of what a terrorist attack to the air traffic industry can really cause.

Rather than spending more time in analyzing what happened and what were the consequences, I think we should take advantage of this opportunity to elaborate a little bit on what we think from our perspective the solutions could come. Certainly this is not a case in which the solution is to overprotect the traveler because overprotecting the traveler will kill the travel industry. So these are not the solutions. We need to combine other areas in which we can act in order to find intelligent solutions.

The first point I’d like to make is that improving the safety and the security, because those both need to be improved when you talk about terrorism, requires a participation of everyone and by everyone I mean citizens, I mean manufacturers of means of transport, or I mean agencies that do the regulation of that industry, or I mean government or law enforcement. All of them have a role to play and the best and fastest way to fight terrorism is to make a good definition of what everyone has to do, what are the roles and responsibilities of all the actors in play.

And overcome the political debate, because until the political debate is overcome and we consider this a technical problem, we will not get close to the solution. I think coordinating the action of all those players, of all those actors, is the challenge and that’s where I think that the business world and large companies like the one I represent can play a role, because they have the experience and the know-how how to devise systems that can efficiently coordinate and integrate the actions of several players in a very efficient manner, and from information systems and communications systems create the necessary intelligence that can be used in order to fight efficiently against terrorism.

The need of a large partnership and the need of a working together spirit inside that partnership between, as I said, the citizens, the government, the law enforcement, the business community, the users, etc., I think is the way to improve security for transport. That would be my conclusion to this. Thank you.

David Unger
Before we move on to William Fell, I’m wondering if I could ask you about some of the – 9/11 was not the first spectacular hijacking in history, but it initiated this new trend of suicide hijacking, which changed the rules. It made much of the protocol of humoring the hijackers, getting the plane safely on the ground, irrelevant to what you’re dealing with. For the aircraft industry, it raised cost-benefit trade-off and some issues, not technical issues, political issues. In the United States for example, the hardened cockpit doors, the question of interference devices from ground-launch missiles near airports and the rest of it.

From the perspective from where you sit, are these rational or hysterical responses, what kind of cost-benefit do they have? Obviously they add cost, which is a negative incentive, obviously they provide reassurance. Where do we look for a rational trade-off there? And who should pay for it, of course?

Pedro Argüelles
I can have a lot of understanding for some of those measures. Future debate for some of them, the cost-benefit analysis, is something we should not forget. We believe in free enterprise; we cannot ignore the cost-benefit analysis.

Some of those measures are very rational and very effective, so I am very much in favor of them. Of course, some of them are just not able to pass that cost-benefit analysis and probably they will not be enforced.

I quite frankly think that we need to elaborate more on trying to prevent the possibility of that kind of attacks happening. If the threat is a car bomb in the street, we would not be very intelligent to propose as a countermeasure for that to send all citizens of that city to leave their house wearing a safety waist jacket or helmet, because that’s not the way that we consider that life in the city can be developed. We don’t want to have all the people walking around on the streets wearing that kind of protection.

We need to act more intelligently and that’s why I suggest that we need to integrate more the players, their roles, and treat that with effective information, communication systems that transform data into intelligence.

David Unger
Thank you. William Fell, we’ve been circling around the airline industry; now we get to it directly. As a man whose job is risk assessment, we can look at some of these same measures, not so much as in aircraft design but what we’ve started to talk about, the security measures which reassure the customer but also delay the flight and may add costs. Where do we look for trade-offs? Where do we look for acceptable levels of risk? How do we convince the potential flyer that the airlines are not putting their own bottom line and volume capacity ahead of the traveler’s safety?

William Fell
Thank you, David. Can I start by thanking the Institute for inviting me to attend this panel, which is addressing a subject which is very close to my daily concerns.

I think inevitably, coming last in this line of distinguished speakers, I may be going over some ground that is already […] we can to avoid any harm coming to our passengers or to our aircraft. We work on the basis that any major airline that loses an aircraft to a terrorist attack, a catastrophic terrorist attack, is likely to find that it doesn’t have a bottom line after two or three years because confidence and perception is very important, as people have said, and nobody will want to fly on an airline that has clearly failed.

I hope that answers the question you just put to me, David, that as far as the traveling public is concerned that they should obviously look at airlines and assess the result, whether they believe that their performance is a responsible one, because any responsible airline is bound to work on the basis that it must keep its security 100 percent or perish.

However, as a private citizen, I’m picking up Pedro’s point. It is clear that we can’t all go around wearing body armor and not going outdoors on the days when we’re told that there are terrorist threats and so on, and so forth, because life would come to a halt. Where do we find the middle line between my public responsibility, should we say, and my private responsibility?

I think obviously the role of government in this is very important. Governments have a problem as well in that, I certainly know the British government, and I sense the United States government and indeed any other government in the European Union, any responsible government, is surely not going to wish to be left with the responsibility for an action that it could perhaps have avoided.

We’re having a very bitter debate at the moment in the United Kingdom about the powers the government wishes to have to lock up terrorist suspects without trial, and many people, me personally included, think that this is actually going too far because I believe that there are basic fundamental freedoms that are more important to my country’s existence than abuse of those freedoms to protect us in the short term. However the government obviously has to have a different perspective and is working very hard to try to persuade people to allow them to lock up people without trial.

Let me give you three examples from the aviation industry of where I can see the problems of this paradox. Two of them are current, one is a potential for the future.

The first one is trivial and it picks up on the question of the cost-benefit analysis of the reinforced cockpit doors. We invested in British Airways 150 million pounds, which is a lot of money, in fitting reinforced doors to our aircraft, unlike the U.S. airlines, and this is a problem the European airlines have with the United States generally. Unlike U.S. airlines, we were not subsidized by our governments to do that work whereas U.S. airlines were. So that was money off our bottom line.

When you fly on British Airways, we pride ourselves on our service as a lot of airlines do, it is a great disappointment to a lot of people flying, who paid money to fly in first-class or in club that they still get their meals served with plastic cutlery. We have to say we have been trying to persuade our governments and other governments, that the logic of the reinforced cockpit door, which means that nobody could now repeat a 9/11 type invasion of the cockpit and take over the aircraft, is that we should be allowed to use metal cutlery again. We’ve done several designs of blunt knives. In fact we reckon that our plastic knives are actually sharper than out metal knives, but no government will yet agree that the logic of our investment in the reinforced cockpit doors we should be allowed to use metal cutlery again, and that is the issue that is just beyond the ability of any minister as far as I can see on either side of the Atlantic, to handle at the moment, which is a pity.

The second is, you asked the question about are there different measures for flights operating between European countries and those in the United States. There is only one exception. We have always operated at the same level of security in checking passengers out wherever they’re going, because as far as we’re concerned, the one chance we get is to vet people before they get on our aircraft. After that, once you’re at 35,000 feet, it’s harder to resolve the problem. So we’ve always had very tough measures.

The one difference is that the United States now operates a system of what we call watch lists so that we have to submit the names of all our passengers, all European carriers have to do this, we have to submit the names of our passengers to the United States during the boarding process. We try to do it in the three days preceding the flight’s departure but we find ourselves sometimes up against a very tight timeline. In principle this is not a bad idea, that if a known terrorist happens to be on your aircraft, it would be a good idea to find that our before he does something. However the problem is, the famous phenomenon, garbage in, garbage out, the lists that the Americans have provided us don’t make sense.

You may remember the senator Edward Kennedy testified that he was actually barred from boarding a flight to Boston Massachusetts from Washington D.C. because there was a guy called Edward Kennedy on the watch list and when he testified, he said, “I take this flight a hundred times a year but I was still told I couldn’t board it because my name matches that of the man on the watch list.” We had an incident recently of one of our aircraft being turned back in mid-Atlantic because of information that we weren’t sure made sense. There was the famous incident of British pop singer Cat Stevens, now known as Yusef Islam, where a continental aircraft had to divert to Bangor, Maine and lost a day’s worth of activity.

The watch list has grown from 1,500 names to 70,000 in the last twelve months and it’s likely to grow further. We’re very worried about whether this is not becoming a disproportionate use of information. It’s got to be good to be worth deploying.

The third point, and now I’ve come to my conclusion, is one of the threats, and I don’t want to exaggerate it out of context, one of the threats that aviation faces is of course the one from missiles that were used unsuccessfully, thank goodness, in Mombasa in 2002. They’re being used in Iraq. Therefore we have to worry that they are potentially something that the terrorists will be thinking of using.

There are systems for countermeasures on board aircraft. We’ve had a look at them. They are very expensive. We’re not convinced that they’re adaptable to commercial use because they’re basically military systems. At the moment none of them is actually capable of being rolled out. The question I would pose is what happens if – particularly and again I’m sorry to concentrate on the United States but this is where a lot of the policy gets made – what happens if an attempt is made in the continental United States to bring down an aircraft, whether it’s successful or not, using one of these missiles, will the U.S. Congress react by saying that all six and a half thousand American sold aircraft must be fitted with these measures? Will they say that no aircraft entering U.S. space may do so unless it is fitted with these measures? Because if they do, we will find that airlines and air travelers are paying a huge amount of money for a benefit that would seem to me to be minimal in relation to the threat.

These are the sorts of paradoxes that we have to address and I believe it is ultimately up to companies to make sure that they do 100 percent of their responsibilities. It’s up to citizens to say hang on, are we really correcting in panicking as much as we’re doing? Of course it’s for the governments to strike the balance, to say to the companies do this please but make sure when they’re asking companies to do things, they’re asking them to do things that are sensible and proportionate.

David Unger
Thank you very much and thank you especially for bringing up the civil liberties issue, a safe democracy being our overall theme here, and of course, it comes in two ways. The safety of people having the liberty of travel but it’s also the safety of people from bending our constitutional protections and perhaps forming irrational…

What I’d like to do here in the time remaining is ask one or two what I would call flash questions of the panel, try and give me a 60 or 90 second response if you have a response, otherwise let other panelists address it and then we’ll have some exchange with the audience.

I was very taken, Francisco, with the highly vulnerable, highly resistant frame, I think that wonderfully focuses on what we’re talking about here. I’d just like the thoughts, if any panelists would like to address it, on where we are now in the vulnerability, in the resilience cycle basically, where the psychology of travelers are, whether there has been perhaps some psychological adjustment from first the moment where risk appears in an unexpected, unanticipated direction and the reaction is total: stop it. And then people have a chance to sort out the really rare frequency of the threat and make some adjustments, realize that we all take risks in our everyday lives and apply it to our traveling lives as well. Anyone who wants to start on that?

(Continued in: Terrorism and the Travel Industry, part 2).

Photos

From left to right: David Unger, Isabel Aguilera, Francesco Frangialli, Víctor Aguado, Pedro Argüelles and William Fell. (Photo: Club of Madrid)

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