Thomas Cook India recently hosted the first ever India Travel Summit – an initiative aimed at providing a platform for exchange of ideas benefiting the travel and tourism industry. The half-day summit included three panel discussions addressing challenges and highlighting opportunities related to security and consular assistance, outbound and inbound travel and repositioning India as a premium tourist destination on a global platform.
The summit was attended by over 100 travel professionals from across and was by invite only. The panel discussions were moderated by Mahesh Iyer, chief operating officer, Thomas Cook India; Vishal Suri, managing director, SOTC Travel Services; and Dipak Deva, MD, Travel Corporation India.
In his welcome address, Madhavan Menon, CMD, Thomas Cook India, said, “With economic uncertainty, terrorist attacks, political unrest being the ‘new normal’ it is challenging for the travel and tourism industry to facilitate a safe and unhindered travelling experience to travellers. India’s travel story is going to be much bigger and it is fast emerging as one of the most significant markets for tourism, both inbound and outbound; hence there is a clear need for stakeholders in the travel ecosystem to plan the way forward, in sync with current realities.”
Menon elaborated, “The event has been organised with a strategic aim to provide a common and candid discussion platform for stakeholders and decision-makers in the travel and tourism industry in the country.”
Martin Oppus, deputy consular chief, USA, said, “We have close to 900,000 visa applications in a year and our approach is to focus on customers, which is why we have introduced certain measures like pre-clearance at Abu Dhabi – this is a unique travel model and we are planning to implement this in various other cities too.”
Colin Jones, UKVI, regional operations manager, British High Commission, UK, added, “India is a key market for the UK and we witnessed an 11 per cent growth in visa applications in 2015 and we are confident of touching a 15 per cent growth figure in 2017. Brexit has not had an impact on the plans of Indian tourists and the travel process doesn’t change. We believe that there will be an increased effort towards digitisation of the travel process as a result of this.”
Suman Billa, joint secretary, ministry of tourism, Government of India, believes that India has the potential to attract a larger number of tourists than it does today. “Initiatives like visa on arrival are steps in the right direction,” he added.
Talking about taking a marketing approach in promoting tourism, David Scowsill, president and CEO, World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) said, “There lies a good opportunity for public-private partnerships to create a structure jointly and then having a professional marketing organisation to go out and promote the destination.”