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Half Empty Or Half Full

Why are foreign tour operators dropping India-specific pages from their websites and brochures. What went wrong?

Bad times ahead?

Foreign tour operators are fed up with India, and are fast deleting ‘India’ specific pages from their websites and brochures. Could this be happening? Well, passenger traffic is down, and could fall further.

Hey, hey, hey. This is the land of Goa and Kerala that we’re talking about, the land of the Taj Mahal, the land of the great Indian Hope Trick, the land of original elephant-borne gatecrashers, where people dream of turning a less-than-half chance into a whole… so, what gives?

Sometimes, half is half is half. And when it’s less than half, it’s less than half. Whatever spin one may want to put on the numbers, they just don’t look good. Last year, the number of passengers handled by the tourism industry declined to 505,000, down from 580,000 in 2000-01.

Travel portal Journeymart.com has recently conducted a survey to assess the impact of India’s image as a tourist destination on actual inbound tourists. The findings? To put it bluntly, people are tuning out. They know a lot about India (by global standards), as detailed in BT’s survey of India’s Best Non-corporate Brands (see issue dated August 18) But are just not coming.

Subhash Goyal, Chairman, Stic Travels, explains: “India has become an unreliable destination for overseas tour operators, as the country increases monument fees, service taxes and what-have-you, at will, while foreign tour operators print brochures at least a year in advance.”

The result: ‘gate shock’. “So if the foreign operator is given a certain price such as the entry fee to the Taj Mahal, that’s not what it is when the tourist shows up.” A few more unsavoury experiences, and the half-full begins to look like half-empty – and getting emptier.

Hotels can be an irritant source, too. The rupee has been falling, but most hotels have refused to cut their dollar tariffs – thus effectively hiking prices, at least in comparison with rival destinations in East Asia, which have become markedly cheaper for the foreign tourist ever since th Asian Crisis.

India has been a big loser. And tourism, remember, is a perishable good. Lost once, gone forever. This is something India must recognize. For Uttam Dave, CEO, Pannell Kerr Forster (PKF) Consultants, “It is a very serious situation, like losing shelf space and with the depletion in ‘India’ pages, we are fast fading from top-of-the-mind awareness.”

The fact that India features only in the omigosh section of foreign newspapers, of course, hasn’t been much of a help, either.

What can be done? Travel agents, says Dave, play a big role in guiding travellers to a particular destination (or warning them off). Indian spin-doctors can begin by talking to them, and explaining how India is still the place to visit. Adventurous tourists won’t be disappointed.

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