With the communal violence in Kandhamal district and the recent terror attack in Mumbai threatening to impact the arrival of leisure tourists in Orissa, leading hotels in the city are planning measures like scaling up the advertising budget and also thinking of offering 15 to 20 per cent discount on their room tariff to boost the tourist inflow.
“This year, we have raised our advertising budget by around 20 per cent to counter the negative publicity which Orissa has got as a tourism destination owing to the communal violence in Kandhamal district”, JK Mohanty, managing director of the city-based Swosti Group and president, Hotel and Restaurant Association of Orissa told Business Standard.
Swosti Group which runs two hotel properties in the city and a resort in the coastal town of Gopalpur may also offer a 20 per cent discount on its average room tariff to ensure high occupancy levels during the peak tourism season. Leading star hotels in the city which usually record occupancy levels of 85-90 per cent during the peak tourism season are expecting a 15-20 per cent drop in the occupancy levels this year due to the economic downturn and also due to the violence in Kandhamal.
While Swosti Group has already lined up its strategies to counter any dampening effect on leisure tourist arrivals, other leading luxury hotels in the city are adopting a wait and watch approach.
Sandeep Sharma, general manager, Hotel Hindustan International (Bhubaneswar) said, “We spend an average of Rs 1.5 lakh on advertisements every month and this year we have no plans to scale up the advertising budget. We reckon that the prevailing economic slowdown and incidents like violence in Kandhamal and the terror attack in Mumbai are going to impact our business but we have not witnessed any cancellation in our room bookings so far.”
Sharma hinted that HHI, Bhubaneswar may go for a downward revision of 15-20 per cent in its room tariff but such a move would only be triggered by demand. At present, the average room tariff in HHI Bhubaneswar is in the range of Rs 6,000-7,000. Surya Parida, executive director, MayFair Hotels and Resorts said, “We have not gone for an upward revision of our advertising budget this year as we feel that we feel that our clients, both in the corporate and leisure travel segments are well aware of MayFair’s products and services. Moreover, incidents like the terror attack in Mumbai are not going to have any substantial affect on our business as most of our customers in the leisure travel segment are domestic tourists.”