New Delhi, Oct 21: India`s travel industry is striving to strike it rich. A traditional welcome at the
airport, a charter flight for inland travel, an executive escort, a chauffeur driven Mercedes whose only stop is a luxury destination resort.
This is but a sample of where the Indian travel industry is headed, whose target of late happens to be
pampering the super duper rich traveller who makes no big deal about shelling several thousand dollars more for an everlasting taste of incredible India.
Creating opportunities for this tribe to grow are the luxury destination resorts providing a wide variety of
experience under one roof. Though the luxury travel market still accounts for only a small percentage of the 2.7 million overseas visitors to India last year, this segment of high-end travellers, say travel industry watchers is likely to grow by 75 per cent by the end of this year.
A luxury destination resort is one that provides an array of experiences and facilities to keep guests occupied in one location for a week or more, says Paul Simmons of the Oberoi group. If we want our infrastructure to grow and be world class there is need for not only massive corporate investments
but it is also imperative to attract the upmarket traveller to the country, points out travel writer and critic Rabindra Seth.
He says that attracting the high spending visitor to the luxury destination resorts and other places of tourist
interest is crucial for Indian tourism. This is because the yield per tourist per day in India is already among the lowest in the world and is declining further. WTO figures indicate that the average spending of a tourist in India is 40 dollars compared to 252 dollars that a visitor spends in Singapore per day and 78 dollars in Thailand.
Tourists arrivals in India are roughly 2.75 million a year. This is nothing compared to what other countries with fewer areas of interest get, Singapore gets nearly 7 million visitors. India`s share of global tourism has remained static at 0.3 per cent. In ranking we have slipped from position number 47 to 53 over the last seven years. If one takes China`s example, one will find that it has reached the fifth position from the 20th with 37 million tourists.
Once we give them a good experience, the traffic will grow through word of mouth, says Naqshband, whose high-spending clientele is from Europe, Gulf, South Africa and China, adding the trend so far
has been to deal with large numbers the returns of which are limited. This does not happen in the niche market where one caters only to the top end luxury segment.
Bureau Report
