Libya Action Arouses Caution in Plans for Trips Abroad

Orange County travelers are exercising caution in planning international vacations, but there are few signs of panic in the wake of Monday’s American air raid on Libya, travel agents and executives said Tuesday.

“With the other (terrorist) incidents, you never knew where or when it was going to happen next,” said Maureen Rosen, former president of the Orange County Travel Agents Assn. “Now it seems more like a war situation than a terrorist situation.”

Orange County is “a major market” for travel, said Rosen, co-owner and manager of Compass Travel in Orange, with more and more airlines opening sales and marketing offices. “You have people with money,” she said, “and people with money like to travel.”

Rosen said that two European tours her clients had signed up for were canceled Tuesday. Few of her customers have been traveling to or through Rome or Athens. One college student planned to go to Athens from London until his mother called Rosen on Tuesday to change her son’s itinerary.

Generally, travel agents interviewed Tuesday in Orange County confirmed reports that international vacation travel is down and domestic travel is up.

“International bookings are down significantly” already this year, according to Stan Forrest, owner of Hyde Travel of Orange. “People have not come in and said they’re not going to Europe, but some people who want to go have had tours canceled because not enough people have signed up.”

“The pleasure traveler is talking about Mexico and Hawaii,” said Anne-Marie Wilberg, a travel consultant at Viejo Travel Service of El Toro.

Some air travelers are choosing their routes for maximum safety, Rosen said. Those going to Europe are often flying an American airline to London, since Heathrow Airport there has a good reputation for security, and then switching to European carriers, which are considered less likely targets than U.S. airlines for terrorists, to the Continent, she said. “That seems to be the trend.”

Coincidently, 17 Orange County travel agents, including current association president Ed Fishbon, are now in Europe on a “familiarization” trip sponsored by Jet America, which is boosting its new connecting link with Icelandic Airlines in Chicago. The agents’ route was from Orange County to Chicago, Chicago to Reykjavik--the capital of Iceland--and then on to Luxembourg. From Luxembourg they were to take a barge tour of Holland.

“A few people have discussed the situation” of deteriorating relations with Libya, Forrest said, but “many have no basis for choice” when it comes to routing or airlines. He said that only a few of his clients have specifically voiced fears of terrorism.

Tuesday was the final day for high-discount airline fares to Europe. “Today is my busiest day for ticketing to Europe. . . . We’re ticketing to Germany and Switzerland especially,” Forrest said.

An agent at a Santa Ana travel agency said she couldn’t discuss the impact of the Libyan incident because “we’re very busy right now. We don’t have time to talk.”

Many Mediterranean cruise operators have shifted summer itineraries to Scandinavia and Alaska, and business remains brisk. “Our cruise business has never been better,” Rosen said.

At Viejo Travel Service, where most of the bookings are for business travel, customers have been voicing concern in the last two weeks, according to Wilberg. But “at most they’ve changed routes,” she said. “They still take the trip, regardless.”

Most Orange County executives either said they would not be changing their travel plans or refused to comment on their plans for fear of attracting the attention of terrorists.

‘Would Defer Trip’

James Woods, president of Baker International Corp., a major oil service company in Irvine, said that with the drop in oil prices and the sharp decline in oil production, there is little call currently for his firm to schedule trips to the Middle East. He said, however, that if someone suggested traveling to the Middle East at this time, “unless it was an absolute emergency, I would defer the trip.”

Rick Maslin, a spokesman for Fluor Corp., one of the county’s largest employers, said it is against the company’s policy to comment on how it will react to threats to safety. In such situations, he said, the company wants to keep a “low profile.” After the hijacking of a TWA jet in June of 1985, Maslin had said that the company’s business trips would continue as usual, although travelers were being urged to exercise caution.

George Boyadjieff, president and chief operating officer of Varco International, another oil service company in Irvine, said that most of the company’s employees who travel to the Middle East work out of the firm’s facility in Scotland and that he hasn’t discussed the situation with them.

“At this point it is too early to tell what the effects (of the retaliation) are going to be,” Boyadjieff said. “We wouldn’t make any general policy decision (yet).”

Employees for National Education Corp. of Newport Beach occasionally fly to the Middle East to administer contracts the company has with Egypt to teach agricultural methods, according to NEC spokesman Jack Polley. “There is nothing currently that has happened that would cause us as a company to curtail our travel,” Polley said.

Robert Kleist, president and chief executive officer of Printronix, an Irvine-based manufacturer of computer printers, said he travels to Europe or the Far East every couple of months on business and has no plans to cut back his travel. Kleist said he might be more apprehensive if he made trips to the Middle East. He noted that terrorism is nothing new in European travel and is underscored by the highly visible airport security overseas. “You can’t stop living just because there are some terrorists around,” he said.