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Rituparna Chatterjee – Mumbai
VisitBritain through its recently held first mini-roadshow, GREAT Tourism Week (GTW) in India, is promoting new destinations beyond London mainly – Scotland, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Lake District, Peak District and Wales. The roadshow held across nine cities – Kolkata, Chandigarh, Delhi, Pune, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai from July to August aimed at targeting groups, families and millennials. Speaking about the roadshow, Shivali Suri, country manager – India, VisitBritain stated, “According to our statistics, 70 per cent of Indians travelling to UK would stay in London. This number has presently gone down to 65 per cent. So there is an additional five per cent who are travelling beyond London. We are hoping to increase that number.” The mini-roadshow format has been launched this year in place of their annual sales mission. Around 19 sellers consisting of airlines, DMCs, regional tourism boards, luxury hotels were present at the roadshow.
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Shivali Suri
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As for the major source markets for Britain from India, Suri opined, “Bengaluru and Kolkata are the major source markets. However, we have seen growth coming in from Tier II and Tier III cities like Nagpur and Surat as well. At this moment we want to concentrate on the highest growth cities, probably two years down the line we might conduct this roadshow in smaller cities depending on the budget and the response we get.” Apart from GTW, VisitBritain will be continuing with their B2C marketing campaign. This pan India digital campaign slated to start in October will aim at promoting Bollywood tourism and will enable people to choose a destination where they want the next Bollywood movie to be shot in.
In 2013, 15,75,000 Indians visited UK, which is a 10 per cent growth in arrivals from 2012. The annual spend in 2013 was 441 million pounds, an increase of over 32 per cent from 2012. “We are hoping to continue with the same percentage of growth this year. For UK, India is the number one BRIC market since we are a natural market for them and share the same colonial history,” mentioned Suri.
