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Buddha Air has started twice-a-week direct operations between Kathmandu and Varanasi. The flights have been resumed post-COVID and will be flying on Monday and Friday every week. On arrival of the first flight, Ministry of Tourism’s India Tourism Varanasi office welcomed the tourists with rose and anagavastra.

MoT recently organised virtual roadshow titled ‘Incredible India Reconnect 2022’ from 26th April 2022 and IATO has written to them saying that virtual roadshows are no good and are not solving their problems, revealed Rajiv Mehra, President, IATO. They emphasised to have physical B2B meetings by organising roadshows which will be more meaningful and fruitful to revive business, he added.

India has emerged as the number one international source market for Thailand. This was revealed by Cholada Siddhivarn, Director Tourism Authority of Thailand Mumbai office in a webinar organised by DDP for Akbar Holidays along with Tourism Thailand. The webinar saw 1200 registrations and focussed on the SOPs for travel to Thailand for Indian travellers. She said, “Thailand recorded 95,272 travellers from India in the period January to May 2022 making it our top source market.”

     Based on the decisions of the Supreme Committee for dealing with COVID-19, the Civil Aviation Authority has informed all passengers and aircraft operators in the Sultanate of Oman that all precautionary measures and procedures of COVID-19 in civil aviation sector of the Sultanate of Oman are lifted.

Ajay Singh, CMD, SpiceJet, has said that India with its size and being the fastest growing aviation markets in the world, needs to have its own hub and global carriers that can take Indians directly to destinations in Europe or the USA, so that we can bypass their hubs.

Zahoor Qari, CEO, Airlinks Tour & Travels, Kashmir, has said that many hotels, owing to increase in tourist footfall in Kashmir, have hiked their rates extraordinarily, despite not offering services and value for that kind of money. Hence, this puts the tour operators and travel agents in question and jeopardizes their image in front of the clients.

In its Global airline revenue forecast, Bain & Company have said that they don’t expect air traffic to return to pre-pandemic levels until the second quarter of 2025. “One notable shift in the global landscape is the link between Covid-19 infection rates and air traffic has become less linear; recently, infection rates have been rising in many countries, but travel volume (particularly inbound from other countries) now depends mostly on local Covid-19 policies,” stated the report.

Shripad Yeso Naik, Union Minister of State for Tourism, Ports, Shipping and Waterways, has said that as the effects of coronavirus are waning, the tourism industry is slowly reviving and regaining its hold over the markets large-scale job creation along with adoption of newer and improved technology should be the end-goals of the tourism sector.

Willie Walsh, Director General, IATA has said that international travel in first and business class is recovering faster than in economy, when it comes to international travel. “I think that points to a very important sector for the market which we call premium leisure and I expect premium to continue to recover quickly,” he said.