Tourism Must Counter Mumbai Aftermath

By Nitish Sengupta

At a time when Indian tourism, recognised as a major economic activity of our country, was already suffering from the Wall Street meltdown and the general recessionary trend all over the world, it has received yet another serious blow from the Mumbai attacks. I happened to be on a short holiday at a backwater resort in Kerala on November 26 when the news of the terror attacks broke and, almost simultaneously, the resort started receiving an avalanche of cancellation from overseas tourist groups. On enquiries from other resorts in God’s own country, I got similar reports. It was as if the entire West was backing out from visits to India. I was also told that insurance companies in the West had stopped providing insurance cover to visitors to India and that this has crippled the entire inbound tourist traffic.

It is difficult to see how our tourist industry can cope with this challenge. And yet, they must. There must be vigorous tourism promotion in the West. People must be told that India is a vast country — as big as the European continent, and that one localised terror attack in Mumbai, or even Delhi, should not have any impact on visitors coming to other parts of the country, such as the south, the east or the Himalayas. It is as ludicrous as people not visiting Stockholm on grounds of violence in Rome. Also, in a way, the Mumbai attacks must be viewed as a blessing in disguise. The Indian government has become alert as never before and a lot of strong police and administrative measures are in progress to make the future more secure. There is a fresh move to strengthen coastal vigil and hopefully, things will improve in the long run.

Authorities in India should send tourism promotion delegations to all countries where tourism traffic to India originates in significant volumes and reassure the tour operators and tourism agencies that things are improving in India and that they should not fear any further threat to the lives of their citizens visiting India. We should also take advantage of the fact that the world today stands united against terrorism as never before and that Pakistan has generally been identified by the entire world as the hub of international terrorism. The UN Security Council has also taken note of this and passed a resolution urging the Government of Pakistan to take deterrent action against the terror camps and terrorist organisations in their country.

But, tourism industry must also do a great deal of introspection. The time has come to ask questions as to why hotel rates are so high here, much higher than the average hotel rates in tourism-oriented countries. Air tickets too are much costlier here. With the money that is needed to buy an airline ticket from Delhi to Cochin, one can fly to Dubai, Singapore or Bangkok, spend two or three days there and come back. Just as the hotels should seriously consider lowering their rates to match those in tourist centres such as Singapore, Bangkok or Bali, the Indian government and airline companies should also put their heads together to ensure that airfares are brought down to the rates prevailing elsewhere. This necessarily means that the Central and state governments need to reduce the incidences of taxes levied on air travel which are prohibitively high and much more than what any other tourism-oriented country levies.

On the overall cost and benefit analysis, the government should not mind reducing taxes in the interest of getting a higher volume of travel and, to that extent, of forex earnings. Similarly, the hotel industry and the banks and financial institutions which have provided them loans, should sit together and consider reducing the volume of interest burden on the hospitality industry. If the repayment burden is spread over a longer period, as a special case, it shouldn’t be difficult to reduce the interest rates substantially. The same applies to tour operators and transporters. Bearing in mind that they are all faced with almost a war-like situation, it is time to make whatever adjustment is required to meet this adversity.

Finally, there is the issue of domestic tourism in relation to overall tourism in the country. Indians are not only great international travellers but also regular domestic travellers. But traditionally, domestic travel has been associated mostly with religious tourism and somewhat with cultural tourism. There has not been domestic holiday or leisure tourism on a large scale. Can we not persuade a large group of Indians to fill the vacuum created by the sudden disappearance of foreign visitors from, let us say, the Goa beaches, the backwaters resorts of Kerala or the Himalayan trekking camps?

This should be possible with a proper degree of promotion and the right amount of adjustment by hoteliers and travel agents. Once this happens, the Indian tourism industry will not miss overseas tourists. Domestic tourism can fill up the absence of the overseas tourists in all possible ways except that they cannot bring in forex. But in the general situation where India’s forex earning is going up on account of general economic activity, it will not matter much if this declines. In a situation where tourism has to compete with terrorism, there is no way out but to begin by facing these hard realities.