Are We Ready to Welcome Tourists .. ?

Dec’18:

Are we ready to welcome?

As everyone says and it’s true also, Tourism, today is the cornerstone and has a very big role to play in the Indian economy, as it is a major source of employment and foreign exchange, and in order to tap the full potential of this sector, industry has to join hands.

Ministry of tourism is also consistently emphasizing on doubling the foreign tourist arrivals from the current percentage. This is indeed a very good ambition of the ministry.  However, the question is that are we equipped to cater to this big numbers ? as we are expecting , are we really have that much good infrastructure ? Could we give that much safety and security to our foreign guests from the goons in the north side?

On the safety front, the ministry is yet to establish a strong PR mechanism to adapt any sort of negative publicity. And, any small incident puts India many steps back in terms of wooing foreign tourists. Coming to cleanliness, the govt. launched the much needed clean India campaign but this has still remained a only a photo opportunity. Our most iconic destinations and historic places been giving harrowing experience to foreign tourists.  

On a current scenario, to begin with, we have witnessed that international air connectivity is growing at very slow pace. In the last couple of years, we have seen that only a few additional routes have been launched by our own carries like Air India and Jet Airways. We also witnessed that few foreign airlines has re-launched and few are in pipe line to re-enter India. Although our own LCCs are expanding their international market but they are not expanding beyond the short haul destinations. There are few carriers that are begging for additional seats but the govt. cannot increase the seat entitlements under the existing bilateral for them. Are these enough ? Many international carriers are not willing to start international services to India and our own full service carriers are utilizing not more than 40 per cent of their bilateral entitlements. Moreover, industry experts feel that most of the foreign carriers are using India as a feeder market which is basically pushing the outbound numbers.

Coming to the hotel industry, the ministry itself has been reiterating that India needs around 2 lakhs additional hotel rooms to cope with the current tourism growth. The current trend suggests that investment in hotel sector has almost dried up. Almost 95 per cent of international hotels chains are not even investing a single dollar in hotel infrastructure but they have their own limitations. Aggregators are bringing properties in their fold but with this also arises the questions of safety and security.

As a human nature, we firmly believe that every problem comes with the solutions and we do have solutions for all the above concerns. We just need to come together as an industry and adopt developing approach to achieve our goals to attract the foreign guests.