Industry body Faith seeks commercial flights operations in full strength

Tourism and hospitality industry body FAITH on Monday called for allowing operations of commercial flights in full strength to and fro from India to enable tourist arrival in the country and help the sector recover from the impact of the pandemic.

The Indian inbound and outbound travel industry has been shut for the past 23 months, Federation of Associations in Indian Tourism and Hospitality (FAITH) said in a statement.

In the pre-COVID year of 2019-20, the Indian travel industry had received almost 10.9 million foreign tourists and almost USD 30 billion in revenue and was engaged in travel planning for almost 26.9 million outbound travellers from India, it added.

"Both of those two lines of businesses have been completely closed, rendering huge distress, unemployment and financial burden on employees and enterprises of the Indian travel industry in the absence of that work," FAITH said.

A lot of countries have now opened or have announced opening up their borders to fully vaccinated travellers with the impact of Omicron subsiding, it added.

The industry body said it has asked Ministry of Tourism to take up with Ministry of Health for the same and announce the opening up of borders and "resumption of full commercial flights with zero quarantine to fully vaccinated travellers across all Indian ports".