Travel Agents: Renewed Israeli-Palestinian Violence Has Some Changing Plans
Podcast
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Area travel agents say rocket attacks between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants are having an impact on people's choices of whether to visit Israel in the near future.
Mostly, travel agents say, people holding off travel to Israel are those who've talked about going, but haven't yet firmed up those plans. As for those with trips booked, Leah Katz of Kwik Travel says they still want to go.
"They keep calling to make sure their flights are not cancelled," she says.
Mitchell Slotnick of Ridgebrook Travel says he currently has a family of nine in Israel for a bat mitzvah, and the rabbi told him that two minutes after the ceremony, "the air raid sirens went off."
Slotnick says life goes on in Israel, despite the attacks, and families talking with him about trips for the fall still intend to go.
He says he doesn't want to make an equal comparison, but he suspects people are considering their options much like someone might if they were planning to travel to Chicago and heard about all the recent shootings.
Katz says she had a traveler who visited Europe and had been thinking about swinging over to Israel on the way home. Now, she says, he's just decided to skip the Israel portion of the trip and just come back home.
