Saloni Bhatia – New Delhi
With an aim to provide more knowledge about Japan to Indian travel agents and tour operators, Japan National Tourism Organisation (JNTO) hosted its first specialist programme in Delhi and Mumbai. Daisuke Kobayashi, senior director, India, Singapore and Malaysia, JNTO stated, “This is the first time we are hosting a specialist programme in the country. We have had road shows before but this is to further enhance the knowledge of the tour operators. About 65 agents in Delhi and 80 in Mumbai will be trained under this specialist programme. We don’t have an online programme to train the operators right now. But if our offline attempt to educate the operators is successful, we might shift to online training as well.” Kobayashi further informed, “Japan has seen a 20 per cent rise in inbound tourists from India from January to May in 2016 in comparison to last year. The new goal is to increase international tourist visitations to 40 million by 2020.”
Kenichi Takano, deputy manager, South Asian Section, Inbound Promotion Department, JNTO said, “This is the first time we are hosting such kind f a road show to enhance the operator’s knowledge about our country. Majority of the inbound tourists from India go to the states of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We plan to promote other cities of Japan as well. Earlier the shows were held just to provide an introduction, but now we are focusing on teaching and assisting the operators on how to create a product in detail. Japan sees a lot of business travellers from India and only 30- 40 per cent are leisure travellers.”
On an average an Indian spends about a week in Japan in cities like Hiroshima, Tokyo and Osaka. “We wish to promote the Alpine region of Japan as well,” added Takano.