Do You Still Trust Government Travel Warnings?

Perhaps you’ve heard the story of Peter and the Wolf? It’s an old fairytale about Peter who always lies and lies – telling people that a wolf is coming – which never happens. So when the wolf finally does come, nobody believes him anymore.

The outline of the story is that if you warn people about something that isn’t there, eventually they’ll stop listening or trusting you.

You see a similar pattern in the media today as well. I don’t mean to get politically involved, but I’m curious to know your thoughts of the matter.

Does the media sometimes exaggerate what is going on, and steer people away from traveling to countries when they don’t really have to?

Whatever it is, it sure seems like people have stopped listening, and look for other ways to find out the truth.

This became very clear to me a few months ago when the media talked a lot about the violent protests in Thailand. The governments were strongly advising people to stay away from there, but the warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears.

The tourists didn’t listen and continued to travel there even though their government advised them not to.

At the same time I read articles from bloggers who were in Bangkok at the time, and according to them the protests didn’t seem to have bothered them too much, and that the media had just blown it out of proportion.

I can relate to it myself.

Last time I went to India there was a “massive” terrorist threat over the places we were visiting.

Since we booked our tickets independently, we had no idea about this until we were already there.

We thought it was a bit strange that we were the only tourists around, but found out that all charter flights had been canceled (pretty sweet for us :p).

Apart from that the streets were empty of tourists, and our favorite night market was closed, we saw no difference what so ever.

Same thing happened when we went to Bali. The government warned people against going there due to kidnapping risks and such things.

I felt more safe there than anywhere else in the world.

However, I’m still not quite sure what to think when I hear these warnings.

What do you think? Have you experienced similar things? Are all these travel warning really necessary?

( photo credits: best_photo – swimparallel )