Rituparna Chatterjee – Mumbai
Zhejiang Provincial Tourism Bureau is looking at attracting leisure traffic from India to its capital Hangzhou as the latter has presently been receiving only business traffic. “Hangzhou is used as a trading and business area. However, it boasts of an old civilisation, which we are leveraging to promote it as a leisure destination. We are trying to spread this awareness in India and at the same time increase traffic between India and China, by hosting seminars and presentations across the country, promoting the destination on social media platforms and participating in tradeshows,” opined Asif Naqvi, sales manager, Air China Mumbai. When asked about the flow of Indian tourists into the province, Henghui Zheng, director, Zhejiang Provincial Tourism Bureau stated, “Last year, we received approximately 2000 Indians and we are expecting around 10.6 per cent growth this year over last year.”
Visit India Year 2015, which kicked-off in Beijing recently and is part of a two-year tourism promotion programme between China and India, has caused an increased traffic between both the countries. “In February 2015, 67000 passengers travelled between India and China across all airlines, recording a 25 per cent growth over the same period last year,” mentioned Naqvi, adding that, the airline has plans to change its present Mumbai-Chengdu-Shanghai route. “We are planning to expand our flight capacity in October 2015. We presently have a Mumbai-Chengdu-Shanghai route. We are waiting for approvals to change this route and double our capacity with bigger aircraft since the demand is very high. We are looking at a Beijing direct flight. We have four flights per week from Mumbai and Delhi each and our Delhi flights are going to Beijing directly,” added Naqvi.