Tour operators air grievances to PM

Tour operators have embarked on a ‘one message a day' campaign to highlight the woes of the sector to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The five-day campaign was launched by Indian Association of Tour Operators (IATO) on Monday. Each day, the members of the association — which represents 1,700 tour operators, travel agents and hotels — will send a message on the PM’s interactive site to complain about high taxes, weak implementation of e-visas, employment issues, poor infrastructure at national monuments, and lack of tourism marketing campaigns. The campaign will end on Friday.

“The past year has seen an alarming slowdown in tourism arrivals into India and consequently, business for a vast majority of our members. Although government figures show small increases, the actual situation on the ground for the organised tourism sector as reported by our members and partner hotels is very different. It is evident that foreign arrivals into India have a higher percentage of non-tourists,” said Gaur Kanjilal, IATO's executive director in his email to members.

In 2015, India received eight million foreign tourists which is a growth of 4.4 per cent over 2014, according to tourism ministry data. The tourism data include arrivals of all foreign citizens including those of Indian origin – visiting friends and relatives category. This category is not a big contributor to tour operators' business.

A tourism ministry spokesperson did not respond to an email query on the topic.  “The decline (in tourists) can be attributed to a number of reasons. A lack of overseas promotion by the government; outdated brand image; no heads for India Tourism offices across the world; poor public relations efforts to counter negative press; our high prices due to irrational taxation structures,” Kanjilal noted in his email.

Low arrivals are not due to safety or security issues in India, but owing to a lack of effective strategy and campaigns, tour operators said. Even foreigners visiting the iconic Taj Mahal has been declining for the past three years.

“There are problems with e-visa, too, and its payment gateway. Applicants have been facing issues in making payments. We have been complaining about the issues to the tourism ministry, but we felt we need to highlight them directly with the Prime Minister. We are encouraged by the response of our members to our campaign and both our core and non-core members are participating in it,” said Rajeev Kohli, vice-president, IATO.