Plan to set up tourist desk at Indian embassy

In order to encourage Qatari nationals and other residents to visit Indian destinations, the necessity of forming a tourist desk at the Indian embassy was stressed during at a meeting of professionals from hospitality and travel industries, convened by the Indian embassy on Tuesday.
More than 125 Indian travel and hospitality professionals were present, besides a number of businessmen and senior members of the Indian community. The Indian Business and Professionals Council (IBPC), affiliated to the Indian embassy, was the host.
Many responded positively to proposals mooted by Indian ambassador Periasamy Kumaran and embassy’s first secretary Surender Bhagat for the formation of a full-fledged tourist desk at the embassy for facilitating easy travel to India.
Travel industry professionals pointed out some handicaps such as the odd timings of most of the flights leaving Qatar for Indian destinations and also lack of proper connectivity for onward journeys from many cities.
Kumaran said some studies have found only 8mn international tourists travelled to India and this represented only 0.68% of the world tourism. The revenues generated were close to a little more than 0.25% at the world level.
He said the Indian government is exploring ways to increase the travel and revenues to at least 1% of the global tourism by 2020 and 2% by 2025.
“One of the reasons may be the excessive thrust on domestic tourists by tour professionals in India,” said the ambassador while expressing hopes to increase the travel from Qatar to the South Asian country.
The envoy also expressed the Indian embassy’s intent to assist the industry professionals if they required necessary support to rework their marketing strategies.
He said this in response to feedback from some of the participants about the lack of appropriate marketing of the Indian tourist destinations.
Veteran travel entrepreneur Walter Dias, who brought forward a number of travel-friendly suggestions, said the needs, requirements and more importantly interests of those wishing to travel India should be given priority instead of thrusting select destinations upon them.
While welcoming the proposals like the travel desk and collective forum of the industry professionals, Dias, who was an International Air Travel Association (IATA) representative from the Gulf region for more than 20 years and has toured more than 65 countries, said there are also such unavoidable requirements as identifying the timings of tours, duration of stay, itinerary among others.
He said his experience of more than 30 years has found if proper packages were offered depending on the weather conditions of each area of India, there could be adequate number of visitors from among Qatari nationals themselves throughout the year.
Ramchand, another senior industry professional, said Indian travel professionals need to take a cue from such destinations as Malaysia and Thailand. He explained how Malaysia succeeded in attracting more people than their population in 2007 with a catchy campaign as “Malaysia Truly Asia”. The flow is still continuing, he said while pointing out that other Asean destinations like Cambodia and Laos too are attracting large number of tourists notwithstanding their relatively smaller number of hotels.
A senior travel expert who said he had taken a number of Qatari visitors to Indian destinations said he has found some of them expressing astonishment when they learned that the such a large country has only one train like the “Palace on the Wheels”, (which is popular between Delhi and Rajasthan). He asked the embassy if it could move a proposal to the tourism officials on this.
An official of Sheraton Grand Doha Resort & Convention Hotel said the Indian tourism sector needs to work round the clock to enhance its visibility at the international level. She said even today only bare minimum visuals and images of the Indian destinations are available on Google whereas many smaller countries have marketed their tourist spots and attractions heavily.
Some of the participants identified health tourism as one area where India needs to focus on to increase travel from Qatar as quite a number of Qatari visitors have treated at hospitals in India.
Along with the absence of adequate number of topnotch hotels in some of the destinations, exorbitant tariffs during the peak season also came in for criticism from participants.
IBPC chairman K M Varghese, general secretary Sumeet Malhotra and advisory council member M S Bukhari also spoke.