World Tourism Blog

A major winter storm is promising to bring a white Christmas to parts of the West and Midwest, but not without threatening to cause long delays and tough driving conditions for countless holiday travelers.

The storm is expected to dump more than a foot of snow on parts of Colorado and Southern Utah by midday Wednesday, and blow east into the Plains states through Christmas Day. Blizzard warnings were likely on Christmas Eve in Kansas.

“Pretty much the entire central and southern Rockies are going to get snow, and then it’s going east and will drop more snow,” said Stan Rose, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Pueblo, Colo.

South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds declared a state of emergency Tuesday. The National Weather Service in Sioux Falls, S.D. warned of treacherous travel conditions from Wednesday through Friday night, calling the storm “life threatening.”

The Nebraska State Patrol urged drivers Wednesday morning to use extreme caution when venturing out on the roads across the central third of the state because the roads are slick as freezing rain and snow had started to fall.

A day earlier a Colorado woman was killed when her SUV apparently hit black ice and slid across a median in western Nebraska.

In Nevada, multiple wrecks were reported in and around Reno as snow blanketed the area shortly before the Tuesday evening commute. No serious injuries were reported, the Reno Gazette-Journal newspaper reported.

Blustery weather had already snarled traffic in Arizona, with blizzard-like conditions shutting down roads and causing a pileup involving 20 vehicles Tuesday. South of Phoenix, a dust storm set off a series of collisions that killed at least three people.

A tropical jet stream pumping in moisture from the storm’s south was likely to cause plenty of snow as the storm headed into the Plains states.

A winter storm watch was in effect for most of southeast Colorado, the panhandle of Oklahoma and north Texas through Thursday. By Tuesday afternoon, light snow was falling in Salt Lake City. No major airport delays were reported there or in Denver, but holiday travelers across the region were warned to check with their airlines before arriving for flights.

Elsewhere, holiday travelers scrambled to adjust their plans before the snow storm hit.

In Denver, Sarah McAnarney and her husband planned to leave town Wednesday to visit family in Ozark, Mo., with their springer spaniel, Olive. But forecasts prompted them to skip a day of skiing in the Rockies and start driving a day early.

McAnarney said she was caught in a blizzard two weeks ago in the Rockies and needed four hours to drive 100 miles from Vail to Denver. She said she didn’t want to repeat the experience.

“I was driving through a whiteout,” she said Tuesday at a truck stop east of Topeka, Kan. “You couldn’t see over your headlights.”

Craig Rueschhoff, 35, and his girlfriend, Brenna Larson, in Des Moines, Iowa said they had planned to drive 210-miles to Columbus, Neb., to visit his parents, then on to visit Larson’s family in western Iowa, but were thinking of canceling the annual trip.

“We’ve had both my mom and her mom encourage us not to come if the weather is too bad,” he said. “They wouldn’t feel bad if we didn’t come. We’ve gotten their blessing.”

The winter conditions follow a weekend storm that dropped record snowfall and interrupted holiday shopping and travel on the East Coast. Delays from that storm sparked an unruly crowd that included passengers still on standby Tuesday at the Delta Air Lines terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. Police were called to help with crowd control.

Rose said holiday revelers in the West and Midwest should worry about the cold as well as the snow. Temperatures across Colorado on Christmas were not expected to get out of the 20s, with single-digits expected in the mountains. Hard money training.

Tourist arrivals to Asia are expected to shrink as much as 5 percent this year before rebounding modestly next year, but full recovery will only set in by 2011, a travel group said Tuesday.

The region’s performance has been mixed this year with countries such as China and South Korea showing resilience but others like Thailand and Vietnam still in the doldrums, said Greg Duffell, president of the Bangkok-based Pacific Asia Travel Association.

The industry has experienced a slight upturn amid new hopes of a global economic recovery, but visitor arrivals to the region are still down by 5 percent from a year ago and likely to shrink between 4 percent and 5 percent this year, he said. Next year could bring a rebound of between 2 percent and 3 percent growth.

Travel within Asia is largely driving the industry, he added, with long-haul tourism from the U.S., Europe and other distant locations lagging.

“We will see full recovery only from late next year or by 2011,” Duffell told The Associated Press on the sidelines of an airports conference.

Duffel said China’s tourism market has been buoyed by government stimulus and 20 million Chinese were expected to travel out of the country this year. In South Korea, the won’s depreciation has helped spur tourism while Indonesia and Malaysia are both showing robust growth, he said.

But Vietnam, which used to be a tourism hotspot a few years ago, is losing its shine as it has became vastly overpriced, he said. Thailand’s tourism industry is also in the blues, hurt by political instability that has kept holiday travelers away. Because the country serves as a major aviation hub, Thailand’s problems have weighed on regional tourism as well, he said.

With its growing affluence and huge population, “China is shaping globally to be a leading destination and source market for the world” amid further economic liberalization, Duffell said. China is building 92 new airports and accounts for 13 percent of all new aircraft order in the next 20 years, he added. Hard money training