SATTE, South Asia’s largest travel and tourism exhibition, continues to celebrate its silver jubilee year in 2018. As part of the campaign, ‘I am 25’, SATTE organised a conference titled ‘Thought Leadership Summit’ which witnessed 25 industry leaders speaking on a vast range of industry topics. The event was powered by Travel Trends Today magazine. For the very first time, the conference was live broadcasted to the travel trade fraternity across India and there were over 900 registrations and 434 live viewers.
The Summit was addressed by Vinod Duggal, Former Governor, Manipur & Mizoram; Vinod Zutshi, Former Tourism Secretary, Govt of India and Subhash Goyal, Member, National Tourism Advisory Council, Ministry of Tourism, Govt of India amongst others. Moreover, top leaders from various segments such as aviation, hotel, outbound, travel technology and trade association discussed the pertinent issues of the industry.
Speaking about the development in tourism sector Duggal said, “India Tourism is moving forward steadily despite challenges. Multi thousand crores have been allocated for tourism infrastructure, besides that several ministries has launched tourism dedicated programmes like PRASAD, Swadesh Darshan scheme, etc. But, there must be a review done to check if these schemes are really working on ground. When it comes to GST, barring IGST, most of the other GST related issues have been addressed by the Government as per satisfaction of the industry. The ministry has setup a special cell dedicated to Tourism GST. Safety and security is a major concern for tourism in India. One stray case of security gets badly highlighted and puts India in bad light globally. We need to work on identifying particularly vulnerable areas in India and need to increase safety. Religious tourism is the backbone of Indian domestic tourism. But, we need to improve cleanliness in the pilgrim destinations.”
The topics for discussion included ‘India Tourism – Challenges & Opportunities’, ‘Airlines, Cruises and Car Rentals’, Changing dynamics of Indian outbound, emerging trends in ‘Travel Technology’ and ‘Role and relevance of travel associations’.
Talking about the future of this sector Zutshi said, “We have seen a consecutive double digit growth of foreign tourists of almost 15 per cent last year and 1.7 billion domestic visits with 12.36 per cent job employment. We are now on a strong position which further needs to improve, we are 40th rank in the Global Competitive Index and with 14th in foreign exchange earnings. Earlier tourism was a sidelined sector. Now the prioritisation has changed and tourism has been called the engine of growth. Employment capacity of tourism is mammoth, our government has realised this. Spiritual and yoga, health and wellness, heritage, Buddhist tourism is our USP and we should build strategies around these segments.”
An extensive coverage of the summit will be out in October issue
