Last week we emailed out a questionnaire to our global readership asking for an update from those in the SARS-affected areas and those elsewhere to see whether they were still having difficulty with business travel and whether those in non-SARS areas were still reluctant to meet people from places such as Hong Kong.
We received 621 responses, with 62% of the responses coming from SARS-affected areas (Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Singapore) and the remainder from elsewhere.
The 'elsewhere' was a fairly even distribution with 12.3% responding from the US, 11.8% from Australia, 9.9% from Europe, 9.4% from Japan, 9.9% from Korea, 15.1% from Malaysia, 15.6% from the Philippines, and the remainder from Indonesia, India and Thailand.
The results (see below) show that the majority of people from Hong Kong and Singapore are now permitted by their companies to conduct business travel, while the situation is more mixed in Taiwan and China.
However, 61% of those from the SARS-affected countries said they still had difficulty meeting clients in non-SARS areas. Most said they no longer needed to be quarantined when they travelled to a non-SARS area.
On the positive side our poll reveals that only 30% of those from the non-SARS countries were still reluctant to meet people from Hong Kong, China, Singapore and Taiwan.
