Lai See | Hong Kong government's travel alerts are compromised

We see that the government yesterday issued a black travel alert for Egypt, which means that people should avoid all travel to the country since "the situation continues to deteriorate there".

However, two other countries are already on the black alert list, the Philippines and Syria. So how, we wonder, should we view the addition of Egypt? Is it a situation like the Philippines or should we view the Egyptian situation as being closer to Syria?

The latter is tearing itself apart amid a nasty civil war with a horrendous number of civilian deaths. The Philippines isn't remotely like this. Indeed, tourist numbers for the first half of the year rose 23 per cent. Tourists from the United States were up almost 3 per cent, while the very safety-conscious Japanese grew 7 per cent. The number of tourists from mainland China jumped 32 per cent.

Surely, the Hong Kong government should be sending strenuous messages to these misguided countries warning them their tourists are placing themselves in grave danger. The continued blacklisting of the Philippines because of the hostage deaths in 2010 is plainly stupid and makes a mockery of what is supposed to be a warning of the relative risks of visiting these countries. It remains on the list because the government doesn't have the courage to take it off.

Hong Kong people are obviously paying scant attention to the alert because about 65,700 tourists from the city visited the Philippines in the first half of the year, making it the ninth-largest source of tourists with numbers more or less back to 2010 levels. Maybe the government could put a smiley or an asterisk next to the Philippines' blacklist entry to indicate it's not a serious ranking.