Plan to set up tourist desk at Indian embassy

Inorder to encourage Qatari nationals and other residents to visit Indiandestinations, the necessity of forming a tourist desk at the Indianembassy was stressed during at a meeting of professionals fromhospitality and travel industries, convened by the Indian embassy onTuesday.More than 125 Indian travel and hospitality professionalswere present, besides a number of businessmen and senior members of theIndian community. The Indian Business and Professionals Council (IBPC),affiliated to the Indian embassy, was the host. Many respondedpositively to proposals mooted by Indian ambassador Periasamy Kumaranand embassy’s first secretary Surender Bhagat for the formation of afull-fledged tourist desk at the embassy for facilitating easy travel toIndia.Travel industry professionals pointed out some handicaps suchas the odd timings of most of the flights leaving Qatar for Indiandestinations and also lack of proper connectivity for onward journeysfrom many cities.Kumaran said some studies have found only 8mninternational tourists travelled to India and this represented only0.68% of the world tourism. The revenues generated were close to alittle more than 0.25% at the world level. He said the Indiangovernment is exploring ways to increase the travel and revenues to atleast 1% of the global tourism by 2020 and 2% by 2025. “One of thereasons may be the excessive thrust on domestic tourists by tourprofessionals in India,” said the ambassador while expressing hopes toincrease the travel from Qatar to the South Asian country.The envoyalso expressed the Indian embassy’s intent to assist the industryprofessionals if they required necessary support to rework theirmarketing strategies. He said this in response to feedback from someof the participants about the lack of appropriate marketing of theIndian tourist destinations.Veteran travel entrepreneur Walter Dias,who brought forward a number of travel-friendly suggestions, said theneeds, requirements and more importantly interests of those wishing totravel India should be given priority instead of thrusting selectdestinations upon them.While welcoming the proposals like the traveldesk and collective forum of the industry professionals, Dias, who wasan International Air Travel Association (IATA) representative from theGulf region for more than 20 years and has toured more than 65countries, said there are also such unavoidable requirements asidentifying the timings of tours, duration of stay, itinerary amongothers.He said his experience of more than 30 years has found ifproper packages were offered depending on the weather conditions of eacharea of India, there could be adequate number of visitors from amongQatari nationals themselves throughout the year.Ramchand, anothersenior industry professional, said Indian travel professionals need totake a cue from such destinations as Malaysia and Thailand. He explainedhow Malaysia succeeded in attracting more people than their populationin 2007 with a catchy campaign as “Malaysia Truly Asia”. The flow isstill continuing, he said while pointing out that other Aseandestinations like Cambodia and Laos too are attracting large number oftourists notwithstanding their relatively smaller number of hotels.Asenior travel expert who said he had taken a number of Qatari visitorsto Indian destinations said he has found some of them expressingastonishment when they learned that the such a large country has onlyone train like the “Palace on the Wheels”, (which is popular betweenDelhi and Rajasthan). He asked the embassy if it could move a proposalto the tourism officials on this.An official of Sheraton Grand DohaResort & Convention Hotel said the Indian tourism sector needs towork round the clock to enhance its visibility at the internationallevel. She said even today only bare minimum visuals and images of theIndian destinations are available on Google whereas many smallercountries have marketed their tourist spots and attractions heavily.Someof the participants identified health tourism as one area where Indianeeds to focus on to increase travel from Qatar as quite a number ofQatari visitors have treated at hospitals in India. Along with theabsence of adequate number of topnotch hotels in some of thedestinations, exorbitant tariffs during the peak season also came in forcriticism from participants.IBPC chairman K M Varghese, general secretary Sumeet Malhotra and advisory council member M S Bukhari also spoke.