Vietnamese drop South Korea tours over MERS fears

The Middle East Respiratory Syndrome caused by the Corona virus (MERS-CoV) has so far infected 87 people and killed six in South Korea, making the situation dangerous enough for Vietnamese holidaymakers to scrap their plans to travel there, according to Vietnamese travel firms.

Ben Thanh Tourist has repeatedly received cancelations for its nine-day package to South Korea over the last few days, a company representative told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Saturday.

The company thus is likely to cancel its nearest scheduled tour on Tuesday, the source said, adding customers can choose to switch to other packages or get a full refund.

Other tour operators including Saigontourist and Vietravel said most of their customers have switched to traveling to Japan following news of the widespread outbreak.

Other Vietnamese travel firms have suspended organizing packages to South Korea.

South Korea now has the second highest number of infections in the world after Saudi Arabia, Reuters reported Monday, citing data from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

South Korea’s Health Ministry announced 23 new infections the same day, bringing the total to 87.

Airlines that have services between Vietnam and South Korea said they are willing to help travel firms with booking changes so that the tour operators and tourists “will be under no pressure” to cancel tours.

Tu Quy Thanh, director of Lien Bang Travelink, told the Saigon Times Online on Sunday the company will call off a South Korea package scheduled for this week as “20 percent of those who booked the tour have asked for cancelation.”

Travelink usually launches two to four packages to the East Asian country on a monthly basis, but all tours slated for July have been put on hold, he told the economic newswire.

The director of a tour organizer in Hanoi said the cancelation rate for South Korea packages has reached 30 percent, which could cost the company a huge loss during this summer if the outbreak lingers.

The Hanoi office of the Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) said it has been contacted by many Vietnamese travel firms for information about the MERS-CoV outbreak.

The office has thus informed the companies that traveling to South Korea is still safe as the infected area is far away from the country’s top destinations, and that the disease is not easily spread.

“There is no chance for tourists to get in touch with the MERS patients so it is impossible that [they] will get infected,” Kang Sungghil, chief representative of the KTO in Vietnam, said in a statement posted on the office’s website.

South Korea is one of the favorite travel destinations for Vietnamese tourists. Last year more than 140,000 Vietnamese vacationers visited the East Asian country, and more than 86,000 traveled there in the first five months of this year.

First identified in humans in 2012, MERS is caused by a coronavirus from the same family as the one that triggered Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. SARS killed around 800 people worldwide after it first appeared in China in 2002.

South Korea's new patients bring the total number of MERS cases globally to 1,236, based on World Health Organization data, with at least 445 related deaths.