Advice and Discontent
Feds' Travel Warnings Are Hit-and-Miss

By Steve Hendrix
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 19, 2006

On Oct. 24, the U.S. State Department posted the following advice on its Web site: "This Public Announcement is being issued to alert U.S. citizens traveling to and residing in Nicaragua to the potential for violent demonstrations leading up to the national election in Nicaragua on November 5, 2006. . . . demonstrations and sporadic acts of violence are possible in major cities throughout the country."

Yikes. Good to know, if Managua was in your fall travel plans. (Or even winter or spring travel plans; the notice doesn't expire until April 18.)

But Nicaraguan authorities quickly responded with their own observation about violent demonstrations in the country: There hadn't been any. Further, none was predicted.

"In relation to the upcoming elections taking place on November 5th, there have been no violent acts or demonstrations reported in Nicaragua and we do not expect them to take place," the Nicaragua Tourism Board said in a huffy press release.

"There has been absolutely no hostility or violence towards visitors to Nicaragua," Minister of Tourism Maria Rivas said in the release. "Nicaraguans welcome travelers now more than ever."

Sure enough, the election came and went peacefully, with no ugly mobs reported.

Welcome to the sometimes confusing, sometimes controversial world of State Department travel advice, a place where caution, politics and commerce all seem to vie for a place in your holiday planning. To some, State's travel guidance Web site, http://travel.state.gov/, is a godsend for uncertain tourists, a first stop when, say, your wife comes home with a brochure on rafting in Mongolia or your sophomore signs up for a semester in Kampala. The travel information there can tip you to everything from the ease of ATM use in Austria to the recent uptick in rapes of foreigners in East Timor.

But to others -- mainly dissed tourism commissions, uneasy travel agents and cocky hard-core travelers -- the department has a Nervous Nelly rep for too quickly turning a vague threat or an isolated holdup into a virtual nationwide blackball.

"In my experience, it's never as dangerous as they make it seem," said Bob Kalish, the owner of Central American Travel Exchange, a Denver-based tour operator. He keeps an eye on the government advisories to the region, including the caution on Nicaragua and a flurry of warnings two years ago about banditry in Guatemala. "I've sent 500 people down there, and none of them had any problem," Kalish said. "Overall, I think travel in Central America is safer than traveling in downtown D.C. or New York."

At worst, the warnings can bring some travel to an unnecessary halt, said Kevin O'Neill of Experiential Learning International, a nonprofit group that organizes volunteer trips to developing countries. Most universities won't set up exchange programs in countries that draw a State Department warning, even when students won't be anywhere near the trouble spot, he said. "The schools won't touch a country with a travel warning. We had a group of students who wanted to volunteer in Kenya over spring break this year. But their college said no, Kenya's on the list. I think Kenya's actually been quiet in recent years, but they can be very slow to give the green light again."

O'Neill also faced waves of cancellations a few years ago when the State Department made note of brewing political unrest in Nepal, even though his contacts on the ground assured him that the Katmandu Valley, where he was sending visitors, was reliably safe. (It was several years, O'Neill said, before Nepal's political crisis came to a head and his group issued its own warning to volunteers.)

State Department officials are fully aware they tread a narrow line between spooking travelers and presenting a complete picture of the risks they might face in the dicier parts of the world. Their job, they say, is to collect data from the embassies and let travelers, parents and schools make their own call. (Only two countries are legally off-limits to Americans: Cuba and North Korea. Otherwise, the government deals only in suggestions.)

"What we find is that people have very different levels of risk tolerance," said Betsy Anderson, head of the department's office of Overseas Citizen Services, the corner of Foggy Bottom in charge of travel warnings. "Some people would like us to tell them what to do. But some don't appreciate the government giving them advice. They'd rather the government give them information and then they can make their own decision."

Anderson said Internet user surveys show that the traveling public, as opposed to vested tourism professionals, has given the system high marks. And even some pros admit that today's system is far superior to the heavily politicized notices common during the Cold War.

"Twenty years ago it was a much bigger headache," said Robert Whitley, president of the U.S. Tour Operators Association, an umbrella group for package tour companies. "Any incident in a country we didn't like would get huge play. A Marine would get into a fight in a Moscow bar and there would be a State Department advisory for the whole country. Now they are presenting the dangers in a more realistic and objective way."

The department offers travel information in three main forms: consular information sheets, public announcements and, rarest and most dire of all, travel warnings. Here's a primer on what they mean.

· Consular information sheets. These are lengthy, detailed portraits of every country in the world. They are reviewed for accuracy every six months and updated at least once a year.

Start here to learn that "Bhutan is a small land-locked Himalayan country led by a king, and is in transition to a constitutional monarchy." And that "Americans in New Caledonia requiring immediate emergency services should dial 17 for gendarmerie (police) or 15 for medical assistance." And that "Many U.S. citizens find the traffic in Senegal chaotic, particularly in Dakar."

You'll find visa requirements, embassy phone numbers and country-specific briefs about topics as varied as local adoption laws and mountain climbing. There are cautionary notes as well. That "Montevideo is facing a wave of petty street crime, which is largely non-violent" is good for the Uruguay-bound to know. More chilling is news that in Bolivia three years ago "an American citizen was murdered during an attempted carjacking in Santa Cruz."

Critics say this distillation of crime and mayhem creates an exaggerated sense of peril about some countries, many with lower crime rates than the United States'.

"They seem to throw in every little crime without much distinction of how likely it is a visitor will actually be affected," O'Neill said. "Even the one for France makes it seem like the most dangerous place in the world. They need some kind of rating system."

· Public announcements. These are temporary notices meant to let travelers know about "terrorist threats and other relatively short-term conditions that pose significant risks or disruptions to Americans."

This is where State told people to expect massive crowds in Germany during the recent World Cup, but also where it advises U.S. citizens to "avoid travel" altogether to Mexico's Oaxaca City, where a labor revolt has killed at least nine people in recent months.

According to Anderson, public announcements typically are prompted by a tip from the local U.S. embassy that is in turn vetted by several agencies in Washington.

When a threat is deemed to be credible, specific and unlikely to be controlled by local authorities, an announcement goes up. It is posted for a fixed period of time, which can be adjusted as conditions demand.

The current public announcement on the risk of violent demonstrations in Nicaragua is not slated to expire for five months. But Anderson says that might change, given the calmness that reigns there after the elections.

"Our reason for putting out the warning was the potential for demonstrations which, based on previous experience, could have turned violent," she said. "I'm sure we'll be reviewing it."

· Travel warnings. The State Department posts these warnings about the countries it considers the riskiest in the world. At press time there were 32 of them, including such no-brainers as Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Haiti. Others are less obvious, including the Philippines (because of threats from radical insurgents and terrorists), Saudi Arabia (ditto) and Algeria (the same, in some rural areas).

The department's own explanation states flatly that "Travel Warnings are issued when the State Department recommends that Americans avoid a certain country." But open the individual links and you find a wider, more nuanced range of warnings, from "defer non-essential travel" (Pakistan) to "consider carefully" the risks of visiting (Kenya) to the almost mild entreaty that "reminds American citizens" of ongoing concerns (Colombia). In many cases, the seriousness of local conditions is made clear by notices that the State Department has gotten its own people out.

"We want to make sure we don't have double standards," Anderson said. "We would never have our embassy families leave a country without telling the general public."