For the past 10 days, there have been no travel enquiries at the airline booking agency where Sunitha works as a travel agent in Ameerpet, Hyderabad. “In the same 10 days, five groups with airline bookings for 20 to 25 persons flying to southeast Asia got cancelled due to fear of the COVID-19 outbreak,” says Sunitha. “There wasn’t this much fear during the swine flu epidemic,” she adds. Her office wore a deserted look and the phone lines have gone silent.

Many frequent flyers from India, in the past several weeks, have either cancelled their travel plans altogether or put them on hold due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Kiruba Shankar, a businessman and director of f5ive technologies, is also the president of Professional Speakers Association of India.

The association consists of the domain and industry experts who get paid to speak at events organised globally. “I witnessed as many as six international events being cancelled owing to the COVID-19 spread,” says Shankar. “Southeast Asian countries are massively hit. In China, speaker events have completely halted. A lot of Indian speakers who speak globally have been hit fairly severely,” he adds. Apart from their regular sources of income, professional speakers are hired by corporations and organisations for anywhere between Rs 50,000 to Rs 3 lakh per talk.

T Chendil Kumar, a corporate trainer from Karnataka who routinely attends speaker conferences in UAE, Singapore and Sri Lanka has limited his travel to just domestic. “A programme in Dubai was cancelled this week. In Singapore, the Asian Professional Speaker’s convention in May this year has been postponed. I have restricted my travel within India. In my travels, I have found that the Kochi airport had well-trained professionals giving good information on COVID-19. Kerala seems to be the only state that is prepared to handle this.”

While those who attend international events are scaling back on their travel plans, so are families taking vacations. Lakshmi Pattabi Raman, a working professional based out of Bengaluru, was to travel to Vietnam this April for a 12-day trip with six families.

Vietnam had reported 16 positive cases of COVID-19 and as of February 29, all those who had contracted the disease have been cured and discharged from hospital.

However, Lakshmi did not wish to take a risk as the group was set to travel with many children. “We have to transit at Bangkok, Thailand for a few hours and then to Vietnam. We didn't want to expose the children to potential risks and get quarantined in a foreign land. With children, we can’t say when one of them develops a runny nose, is sniffling or coughing. We didn’t want to take a risk,” she adds. There have been no coronavirus-related deaths reported among children.

However, getting their airline tickets reimbursed has proven to be a challenge, “We got a refund on our return flight but that was because it got rescheduled by the airline by over 12 hours. We are now in the process of cancelling the other tickets. I hope we will get a refund on the other tickets as well,” she added.

Frequent travellers like Shankar and Chendil often book their flight tickets in advance and they’re sometimes not covered by the organiser. “When the event gets cancelled, the speaker does not have a choice. There is a direct loss for the speaker and for the conference organiser,” Shankar said.