The Netherlands Bureau of Tourism & Conventions (NBTC) welcomed 101,000 travellers from India in 2015. This year the destination is focusing to achieve a growth of 30 per cent from the India market as Jet Airways’ recently introduced Mumbai and Delhi to Amsterdam direct flights is set to play a major role in achieving this target.
Speaking about the India market, Carola Van Rijn, Project Manager, NBTC said, “India is a very important market and one of the fastest growing markets in terms of the arrivals for Netherlands. In 2015, we welcomed 101,000 visitors from India. We are expecting that numbers to grow by 30 per cent this year. From this year, we have started promoting Netherlands once again in India; we were silent for a period. To further promote we have created a plan which includes both travel trade and the consumers’ activities including advertising and social media. We are expecting to continue similar promotions next year as well.”
Presently, most of the Indian travellers visit Amsterdam during their visit and skip the rest of the cities. Rijn added, “The average nights spent by an Indian in Netherlands is two nights. We want to increase this numbers. A lot of Indian travellers combine Netherlands along with other European destinations. As of now around 90 per cent of the visitors go to Amsterdam. The footfalls to other cities are way below the numbers to Amsterdam. We want to attract people to other cities like Rotterdam and The Hague.”
After the successful launch of Mumbai and Delhi to Amsterdam flights, Jet Airways is now all set to increase the seat capacity on these routes. Alok Sawhney, Head, International Sales, Jet Airways said, “We started the Amsterdam route eight months ago and have received an excellent response. Now, we have already deployed a B777 from Mumbai to Amsterdam and from January 15 we will be introducing B777 from Delhi also. Our major focus to introduce this route was to increase the relationship, trade and tourism between these two countries. As of now we operate more than 600 seats from India to Netherlands.”
Netherlands is also looking to target the experiential and MICE travellers from India which is very small from India.
Rijn added, “MICE is a big thing here in India. So it’s a segment which we want to aggressively tap. We have a lot of state-of-the-art infrastructure in Netherlands for MICE. We are also creating some storylines and itineraries to attract experiential travellers to Netherlands. For example the Flower line is one, where travellers can go for flower spotting to unique locations, or they can visit the flower auctions that take place at Aalsmeer. There is a whole of destination which people don’t know, such attractions we are planning to promote.”
Also, this year the gateway to Netherlands, Schiphol Amsterdam Airport celebrated its 100th year of operation.
When asked about plans to make Amsterdam the gateway to Europe for the Indian travellers, Wilco Sweijen, Director Aviation Marketing, Schiphol Amsterdam Airport said, “Yes, to make Schiphol the gateway to the European countries, we need access to India itself. This year was an exciting one, with Jet Airways adding two flights and we hope to see more in the coming years. KLM also flies from Delhi to Amsterdam and is keen on developing that market and we have seen that the response is very good. We want to make this airport the gateway for Indian travellers. We have a good access to United States, Canada, UK and many European destinations. Last year we welcomed around 63 million passengers in our airport. The total number of passenger traffic between India and Netherlands was 250,000 travellers. With Jet Airways coming in we expect 400,000 passengers. We have at least 10,00,000 passengers visiting Netherlands rest all transit from here.”
