According to UNWTO reports, the number of Indians travelling overseas is set to rise to 50 million by 2020. Industry experts believe that this is due to India’s evolving and burgeoning middle class from smaller cities who are opting for overseas travel as a result of higher disposable income. Recent times have seen foreign tourism boards gearing up to welcome the emergent and increasing number of Indians who are travelling abroad and splurging. NTO’s such as Switzerland, Thailand, Malaysia, Dubai, etc are aggressively promoting their tourism offerings in unexplored tier II & III markets.
The outbound segment in India is growing rapidly and with an increasing disposal income and increasing standards of living. Contrary to common belief, travellers from tier II and III cities are equally attracted to an over the top and luxurious lifestyle as in metro cities. “People from smaller cities like Ahmedabad, Bhatinda, Lucknow etc see outbound travel as a status symbol. They love the ‘show-off’ factor and this works very well for travel agents and tour operators. The middle class and upper middle class in the metro cities are already well travelled and are looking to travel for adventure and relaxation, not for the tailor made site seeing. Travel agents and tour operators need to realise that this particular emerging market in India has a lot of potential to evolve as it is still at ground level,” opined Guldeep Singh Sahni, President, OTOAI (Outbound Tour Operators Association of India).
Sharing similar sentiments Iqbal Mulla, President, TAAI (Travel Agents Association of India), commented, “It is a must for the travel agents to reach out to tier II & II cities. A large chunk of middle class with disposable income hail from non metro cities, the buying capacity is very similar to people from metros. In the recent past people from cities such as Indore, Surat, Nagpur, Lucknow, Pune, Amritsar have started changing the way they live their life. The standard of living is much higher now days. They want to do more, they want to travel, explore and experience a whole new side to life. Travellers from tier II & II cities are usually first time travellers they prefer to go in large groups with their entire family and tailor made holidays.”
SATTE sees tier II& III cities having a great potential for tourism growth. Hence, SATTE 2014 will focus on tapping tour operators and travel agents from tier cities such as Pune, Ranchi, Bhuwaneshwar, Guwahati, Siliguri, Amritsar, Ludhiana, and many more. SATTE has evolved into a one of the biggest travel trade events globally and has witnessed buyers from over 43 countries and 74 cities in 2013. SATTE received buyers from cities like Indore, Patiala, Pune, Nagpur, Coimbatore, Vishakapatnam, Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara and Nashik among others. To be held between January 29 -31, 2014 and February 3-4, 2014 in New Delhi and Mumbai respectively, the event aims to bring together industry stakeholders under one roof.
