ETW STAFF – Mumbai
India’s inbound tourism strategy needs to be tailored to the leisure segment, business travel, medical and adventure tourism and domestic tourism should be targeted at the middle age segment (35-50 years) to cash in on the rising disposal incomes and increased propensity to travel, revealed a FICCI survey.
The survey findings released by Dr Jyotsna Suri, vice president and chairperson, FICCI’s Tourism Committee, showed that a bulk of the respondents (37 per cent) saw potential growth in inbound tourism in the leisure segment. Business travel and medical tourism came second with adventure tourism, the third. The respondents were of the view that India’s tourism should target the middle age segment (35-50) to accelerate its growth. The strategy, hence, should be to capitalise on the growing disposable incomes on travel and entertainment. The survey received 480 written and telephonic responses from tourism industry professionals in hotels of all categories, tour operators, travel agents, airlines, investors and tourism associations. Suri said 55 per cent of the respondents felt that there will be a moderate impact of the slowdown on tourism over the next six months on tourism, 45 per cent opined that there would be no impact.
The FICCI survey also revealed that the industry felt let down by the Union Budget 2013-14 proposals as these had no impact on tourism. In fact, around 45 per cent said the Budget impacted the industry negatively due to major unmet and long standing demands such as declaration of tourism as an industry, export industry status and inclusion of hotels as infrastructure. The silver lining is that 46 per cent of the respondents were confident of the foreign tourist arrivals to go up in the coming six months. Their optimism stems from the fact that foreign tourist arrivals to India have grown by 2.1 per cent in January and February 2013 and in during these two months, the foreign exchange earnings from tourism rose by 19.8 per cent in rupee terms and by 11.4 per cent in dollar terms.
