Rituparna Chatterjee – Mumbai
Switzerland Tourism recently launched the ‘In Love with Switzerland’ campaign in India to celebrate 150 years of winter tourism and to promote tourism to Switzerland from India during the winter season, apart from the summer season. The campaign highlights some new and popular regions like Davos, St Moritz, Ticino and a range of new winter activities and events like sledging, cricket on ice, Snow Polo World Cup St Moritz, and several other mountain experiences. Elaborating on this, Claudio Zemp, director – India, Switzerland Tourism stated, “Through this campaign we are looking at promoting the winter season, and new experiences, attracting more FITs and increasing overnights outside the peak season, which is from May to June. We expect to see a rise of 15-20 per cent overnights in the winter months and expect this growth to come in from the metro cities as the product is more for the evolved traveller.”
Meanwhile, Switzerland Tourism is also promoting the ‘Grand Tour of Switzerland’, launched this year, in the India market. The grand tour is a 1600 km road trip that combines all of the destination’s popular natural and touristic highlights in one journey. This tour can be done from different gateways like Geneva, Zurich, Basel, etc and can be split into any number of journeys.
After a stagnant growth over the last three years, 2015 witnessed a 26.7 per cent growth in Indian tourists during January-June this year from India, with June recording over 40 per cent growth over 2014. Sharing his views on the India market, Zemp stated, “We have good growth coming in from China, India, GCC and the US. It will be great if we can maintain the 20 per cent growth year-on-year.”