by Donald Wood
Last updated: 10:47 AM ET, Tue February 18, 2020
Key travel agents and advisors are revealing the coronavirus outbreak is impacting cruise bookings and causing them to avoid selling the itineraries to clients.
According to The New York Times, some travel advisors are reporting a drop in bookings by as much as 10 to 15 percent, while a Travel Weekly readers' poll found that 63.8 percent of respondents had clients cancel trips due to coronavirus fears.
NPR is also reporting a CEO working for a software company that handles cruise bookings revealed his company saw a 40-percent drop following the quarantine of the Diamond Princess due to a coronavirus outbreak.
Award-winning travel adviser Tammy Levent is typically booking cruises for clients during the busy season, but she is thinking twice about sending travelers on voyages considering the impact coronavirus had on recent sailings, especially in southeast Asia.
"It is typically a very busy season for us," Levent told TravelPulse. "Normally, I'd have at least 5-6 calls a day on cruises since we're a big agency. Instead, we've had zero calls."
"Recently, we had a whole family going to Hong Kong for their son's wedding, but they canceled that trip," Levent continued. "Cathay Pacific Airways is not even willing to give them a refund, which is another issue I'm dealing with now."
While agents and advisors see cruises scheduled for areas impacted by the coronavirus outbreak drop drastically, Levent and others are seeing a jump in interest on voyages in Europe, while sailings in the Mediterranean and Mexico have remained mostly unaffected.
Levent admitted that while the current viral outbreak is a negative for the travel industry, agents and advisors have faced a crisis like this before with norovirus, Zika and more, but have weathered the storms and come out stronger.
In addition to the impact on the cruise industry, a new study found visits from Chinese nationals to the United States could drop by as much as 28 percent this year as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.
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