LOCAL international airline schedules returned to normal last Friday after protesters in Thailand vacated Bangkok’s Suvanarbhumi Airport on December 3. Most travellers still waiting for flights out of Myanmar left over the weekend.

At least 70 scheduled flights between Yangon and Bangkok were cancelled by the eight-day airport blockade, which stranded “more than 1000” travellers in Myanmar, according to Myanmar Marketing Committee vice chairman U Phyoe Wai Yar Zar. He said it would probably take between one and two weeks for the situation to completely return to normal and until then, tourist numbers in Myanmar would be down.

He said while tour operators “did their best to help to help stranded tourists” in difficult circumstances, the flight cancellations illustrated the need for a tourism crisis management centre in Yangon.

“If we had a crisis management centre where accurate information was easily available, then half the work would be done,” said U Phyoe Wai Yar Zar, who is also the managing director of All Asia Exclusive travel agency.

“Currently there is no central organisation that can give information to stakeholders, such as airlines, tour operators and hotels. Last week we had to make several telephone calls just to find out basic information.”

He said there was a breakdown in communi-cation between airline staff at Yangon International Airport and in downtown ticketing offices. With a crisis management team, this situation might have been avoided, he said.

“The staff at the airport were sometimes able to help the passengers get seats regardless of the tickets they were holding. Our tour guides have told us they could often convince the airline staff at the airport to take their clients if there was a spare seat on a flight.

“But we should remember the airlines here in Myanmar had to work under the same conditions as other tourism operators. They didn’t receive sufficient information on how to handle the situation because there were a lot of communication disruptions, especially in Yangon,” U Phyoe Wai Yar Zar said.

But NGO worker Sarah Harrison, whose Thai Airways flight was cancelled on November 29, said the airlines were still struggling to handle the situation on Friday, the day “normal” scheduling resumed.

Ms Harrison was checking into a Silk Air flight to Singapore at Yangon International Airport when Thai Airways’ Bangkok office called the check-in counter to cancel all transfers from Thai Airways to Silk Air.

“Silk Air were told they couldn’t accept Thai Airways passengers anymore. Thai were no longer going to guarantee payment because ‘normal’ flights had resumed,” she said. “I had to hand back my boarding pass, get my luggage from the cargo hold and go to the ticketing office in Sakura Tower to rebook on a Thai flight.”

“When I went to the ticketing office though, they hadn’t been informed by their headquarters that the passenger transfers had been cancelled. I had to inform them.

“It’s like a bad dream. You think you’re so close to going home and then something else happens,” Ms Harrison said, adding that communication between the airlines had been a problem throughout the week.

“There was little coordination between Silk and Thai, so you would get conflicting information from both of them,” Ms Harrison said. “Thai [Airways] didn’t seem to know what was going on, I think because they weren’t being informed by their head office. They basically just said, ‘Go to Silk Air.’”

Passengers were offered flights to U-Tapao Airport, three hours south of Bangkok, but “no one had any idea what was going on there”.

“There were rumours going around that there were international flights going out of U-Tapao but the airlines here couldn’t tell you if that was the case or where those flights were going. It was really just a herding pen for stranded passengers, I think.”

Despite the uncertainty, Ms Harrison said most passengers were resigned rather than angry.

U Phyoe Wai Yar Zar said his clients “understood the situation and were in good spirits”.

“Most of them have commitments – maybe they have to get back to work – so they were anxious to go home. But most of them were calm.”

Mr Ralph Timmermann, deputy head of mission at the German embassy in Yangon, said the embassy fielded many enquiries from stranded German passengers – there were approximately 150 – but “there was no panic”.

“It’s always a difficult situation if an unexpected thing like this happens, [passengers] have got plans, maybe a Christmas schedule and this kind of throws them a bit off balance,” Mr Timmermann said.

The embassy only had a few requests for cash transfers from people who had run out of money, he said.

“There’s a procedure at the embassy for dealing with that problem,” he said. “But the number was quite small because there were very few [German] independent travellers in Myanmar.”

The crisis showed how reliant Myanmar’s tourism industry is on the Bangkok gateway – about 45 percent of scheduled flights to and from Yangon International Airport are via Bangkok.

While it will be difficult to reduce dependency on Suvanarbhumi Airport in the near future because of the limited number of flights into Myanmar, U Phyoe Wai Yar Zar said one possibility is to open up land borders, such as the crossing at Tachileik-Mae Sai.

He said the local tourism industry would suffer financially because of the flight cancellations but it was too early to say how severe the effect would be.

“It works both ways: Some [tour operators] could extend the stay of clients here in Myanmar and send them to other places, such as Ngapali Beach, while they were waiting to leave the country,” he said. “But then of course some agents had tours planned and these had to be cancelled.”