India to promote tea-tasting tourism

If Europe has wine-tasting tourism, India’s answer to that is a tea-tasting tourist circuit, with tea tasting, along with holding international conferences, both new areas India plans to focus on as it seeks to boost in-bound tourism in the coming years, Tourism and Culture Minister Ambika Soni said at ITB Berlin last week.

“There are plans to develop tea-tasting circuits similar to the wine-tasting tours offered in Europe and elsewhere” she said at a press conference at ITB, adding that convention tourism is another area which the Government is keen to develop as it holds great potential in India.

Minister Soni, was at ITB to launch the “India Incredible” campaign at the International Tourism Exchange, saying, “At present, India’s share is only about 8% of the annual global business of $280 million generated by convention tourism.”

Outlining the measures taken by the Government and the industry to promote tourism sector, she said, “Hotel capacity will be significantly improved with the addition of 100,000 new beds planned for the current year and liberalisation of the aviation sector and 100% foreign investments allowed in the tourism sector are expected to attract more foreign investments into the country.”

“Current efforts to diversify tourist attractions by offering new products such as adventure tourism, wellness tourism, medical tourism and golf tourism will have a positive effect on foreign tourist arrivals as well as on domestic tourism”, she added.

India’s tourism promotion campaign as the “Partner Nation” at the International Tourism Exchange in Berlin has helped to generate a strong interest in the country’s tourism offers among the trade visitors from around the world as well as among the German public and India’s ITB promotion is significant not only because it comes as the country marks the 60th anniversary of its independence but it also recognises India’s increasing prominence on the world tourism stage.

“Even though tourism growth in India has not been staggering and the 4.5 million tourist arrivals recorded in 2006 was only a tiny proportion of the 842 million arrivals world-wide, the outlook is very positive for achieving higher growth in the coming years”, Minister Soni said.

“The importance of tourism for Indian economy is evident from the fact that it contributed to 5.9% of the Gross Domestic Product and provided employment to 41.8 million people and 2006 was not only a record year for India’s inbound tourism but was the fourth year showing a double-digit increase in arrivals.”  “Moreover, arrivals recorded a double-digit growth in all 12 months of last year -even during the lean months of summer and the monsoon period.”

She added, “The 4.5 million arrivals recorded were 13% above the level of 2005 and reflected an average annual growth of 9% over the six years from 2000 and the strongest growth in tourist travel last year was in the domestic market as the number of people travelling within the country rose to a staggering 400 million as the number of Indians travelling abroad also rose to 7.2 million”.

She also said, “All developments in the tourism sector will be carried out with utmost care for their environmental implications,” adding,  “ITB provided an excellent forum for presenting the one-year-old “Incredible India” tourism promotion campaign to a high calibre international target group of industry representatives, decision-makers, media representatives and potential travellers.”

Report by The Mole