- More than 2,200 guests have travel plans scuppered
- Tourism legislator calls on government to consider issuing a travel alert for the country
Three major Hong Kong tour operators on Monday axed all trips to South Korea until the end of March, in light of the worsening coronavirus outbreak in the country and amid growing calls for an official alert against travelling there.
More than 2,200 tourists were set to have their plans scuppered by the decisions.
EGL Tours said it would cancel all tours departing for South Korea from Tuesday to March 31, involving 900 travellers from 45 tours.
Hong Thai Travel and Wing On Travel similarly pulled trips to the end of March, both starting from Monday.
Hong Thai, which had earlier announced more conservative cancellations affecting only trips to the capital Seoul until March 15, said its wider changes would affect 1,300 travellers from 65 tours. Wing On did not give a figure for the number of trips affected.
All three operators said their decision was taken to protect the health of customers and staff given the country's outbreak of the virus, which causes Covid-19.
They said customers signed up for the tours could re-arrange within six months or get a refund after deduction of administrative fees. EGL and Hong Thai said arrangements for trips after the cancellation period would be made later.
The cancellations came after South Korea raised its coronavirus alert to the highest level, following a sudden spike in the number of infections. On Sunday the country reported four additional deaths and 169 more cases " many connected to a religious sect.
As of Monday morning, the death toll in the country stood at seven, with 763 confirmed cases, the highest outside mainland China or the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan.
Hong Kong's Security Bureau has not issued a travel alert for South Korea or Japan, despite rises in infections in the two countries, but said it would issue an outbound travel alert, on the advice from the Food and Health Bureau, "should there be public health reasons" to do so.
Professor David Hui Shu-cheong, an infectious diseases expert at Chinese University, said the city's government might consider issuing travel advice for South Korea, but in the meantime any Hongkongers planning to visit "should wear masks and be vigilant about personal hygiene".
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Yiu Si-wing, who represents the travel sector in Hong Kong's legislature, also urged the government to consider issuing a travel alert for South Korea if the outbreak continues.
In 2019, Hong Kong received more than 1.04 million South Korean tourists, accounting for about 8.5 per cent of non-mainland-Chinese visitors, according to statistics from the Hong Kong Tourism Board.
Yuen Kwok-yung, a leading microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong, said the Centre for Health Protection was in discussions on whether to bring in quarantine measures for people who have visited South Korea or Japan.
"It will decide what steps it should take on those people " whether they should make health declarations, undergo medical surveillance or be confined to a 14-day quarantine," he said.
Yuen said the appropriateness of a two-week quarantine depended on the risk. "If the person is coming from Daegu, an outbreak zone in South Korea, then he or she must be confined to the quarantine. But if the person is from Seoul without any contact from Daegu people, then there's no point putting them into quarantine," he said.
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