Down and Out in London or Elsewhere

An American lady vacationing in Italy seeks advice at the American consulate in Florence. She gets a crisp brush-off from a pompous young vice consul. "I pay your salary, young man," she protests, but in vain. That scene in Olivia de Havilland's 1962 movie, Light in the Piazza, often evokes a knowing chuckle from seasoned American travelers. U.S. consuls have a reputation--sometimes deserved, frequently not--of being coldly impervious to fellow citizens in distress. Now that the expanding but unreliable charter-flight business is leaving a growing number of travelers high and dry (TIME, Sept. 4), the question of the consuls' responsibilities is more pressing than ever.

Britons to the Rescue. Two weeks ago, 122 Americans found themselves stranded for four days at London's Gatwick Airport. The Daedalus Travel Agency in New York, bookers of their charter flight, had failed to provide a plane for the return trip. When the Americans sent a deputation to the U.S. embassy, they were "totally disillusioned," in the words of Ruth Jacobs, a tourist from Queens, N.Y. "The embassy was adamantly opposed to giving us aid or getting us out of there." Eventually Britons came to the rescue. The British Social Service dispensed cash for food. The Grosvenor Hotel put the travelers up for a night in $20-a-day rooms without charge, and British Caledonian Airways and Wimpy International Ltd., a hamburger chain, chartered a plane and flew them home free.

On the other hand, when 80 travelers were stranded in Moscow last week by an overbooked regular flight on Aeroflot, the twelve Americans involved had a very different experience. The U.S. and British consuls painstakingly negotiated with Aeroflot to fly the strandees out the next evening--although not before the travelers, who had no transit visas, spent several hours locked up in their hotel. When the U.S. consul went to convey the good news, he was besieged by angry Japanese who claimed that they were ignored by their consul. "A novel experience for an American consul," he commented.

While a consul's primary role is to assist Americans abroad, there are a great many misconceptions about his powers. If the State Department gives prior approval, a consul can aid a strandee by making a repatriation loan for the price of a return ticket, plus a small subsistence allowance--both on condition that the strandee surrender his passport. The State Department then holds the passport until the loan is repaid. In practice, only the mentally ill, the seriously injured, the infirm, the aged and "those with a hardship story good enough to make strong men weep," to quote a longtime observer, have any hope of being repatriated.

A big U.S. embassy like the one in Paris arranges between ten and 25 repatriations a year. Other cases are referred to the American Aid Society, an organization run by U.S. and French businessmen. In Japan, the Columbia Society of Yokohama lends Americans a helping hand with small loans and emergency cash. When visitors run afoul of local laws and regulations, embassy legal staffs are required to respond. But as an American resident in Tokyo puts it: "They don't break any track records going to the rescue."

Sympathy and concern aside, a consul's ability to help is limited by State Department policy. "You'll have to prove destitution before the embassy can help," said a department spokesman last week. "And if you're flying around Europe on vacation, it's hard to prove destitution." He has a point. Still, even a careful traveler can find himself in dire emergencies through no fault of his own--because of sudden illness, strikes, or loss or theft of his money.

As the London Sunday Telegraph put it last week: "Surely it is time that Washington caught up with the tides of modern travel. Millions of tourists these days exist on tight budgets. When unexpected disaster hits them, they become at least temporarily destitute, and that ought to be enough to stir any parent government into action, especially the richest one in the world." Indeed, in a day when much of the world's business is conducted on credit and millions of people travel, the State Department definition of an emergency, written decades ago, may be in need of review. Businessmen the world over recognize Americans as good credit risks; perhaps Washington should do the same.

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