More than 1800 meetings are expected over two days at the sixth edition of Travel Luxury Show, scheduled from September 14-15, 2019 at the Crowne Plaza Jaipur. Over 60 buyers and thirty exhibitors will be part of the event. The show offers participants an opportunity to have one-to-one meetings with exhibitors belonging to luxury hotels, destinations promoting luxury holidays and other products targeting high-end travellers from the country. The event allows exhibitors to interact with travel trade luxury buyers across India, focusing on Tier II, III cities along with Tier I cities. Guaranteeing over 60 pre-scheduled B2B meetings per exhibitor, the table-top event acts as the perfect business platform for attendees. Apart from that industry veterans attend the show as keynote speakers. There is a networking dinner as well, where participants get to meet and interact with more buyers.

Spending on foreign travel was at $596 million in June 2019, which was 42% of the total forex purchased by Indian individuals in the month, according to Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which started collating data under the liberalised remittance scheme since 2004. It has been the highest spent on travel since then and was $381 million, accounting for 37% in June 2018. In the first quarter of FY19, international travel cost the country $1,594 million of the total $4,181 million in forex purchased by individuals between April and June 2019. In April-June 2018, travel was $1 billion out of a total spend of $3 billion. After travel, the next thing that Indians spent foreign exchange was education at 25%.

There is a ‘huge’ scope to improve India’s tourism sector, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on the 73rd Independence Day.  He said the time has come to boost exports and that each district of India has much to offer. “Let us make local products attractive. May more export hubs emerge.” he adds. He also said the world is eager to explore trade with India and the government is working to keep prices under check and increase development.

On 73rd Independence day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his speech has urged the citizens of India to visit at least 15 tourist destinations by 2022. He said, “I want the citizens of India to visit at least 15 tourist destinations, with the family by 2020. I know people travel abroad for holidays but can we think of visiting at least 15 tourist destinations across India before 2022, when we mark 75 years of freedom?” He said people should visit Indian destinations even if there are no hotels or infrastructure there, as their visits would boost tourism in these areas and automatically lead to better facilities. 

The Indian Association of Tour Operators (IATO) will now start promoting outbound tourism to neighbouring countries in a bid to help its members expand their horizon of business as well as improving bilateral ties with the countries to get more tourists to India and simultaneously send tourists from India to such destinations. The association invited Dubai Tourism, TCEB and Thai Airways to discuss their plans to work together. The association is also working to promote outbound operations for its members with an intent to develop a model of cross-border tourism. In a first such interactive meeting organised for IATO members who do outbound or want to do outbound, IATO introduced its members with the idea and intent to promote outbound tourism as well. Sharing more details, Rajiv Mehra, VP, IATO & EC Liaison, Outbound Tourism Promotion Committee said that they are first looking to target the neighbouring countries like Thailand, Dubai, Vietnam and can further move on to other countries. “Let us learn things and promote India for inbound tourism to our neighbouring destinations and also for outbound tourism so that more Indian tourists travel abroad. Whatever less business is coming to India, let us get it filled up with such initiatives,” he said. The association is planning to organise such ‘Outbound Knowledge Forum’ bi-monthly now on with talks going on with at least three other NTOs.

According to The International Air Transport Association (IATA), the domestic India market has proven resilient with the closure of Jet Airways earlier this year. Growth in domestic RPKs (revenue passenger kilometers) have recovered strongly, lifting to a 7.9% year-on-year pace in June, as the remaining carriers moved quickly to fill the gap created by the loss of a competitor and to meet the customer demand.

J.B. Singh, President and CEO, InterGlobe Hotels, recently disclosed that IGH will expand majorly in Tier-I cities. He says, “The standard big metros like Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru are high-growth markets with good absorption rate, not just from hospitality side, but from the aviation and commercial real-estate side as well. There is great demand from the customers to build hotels in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Gurugram. We must manage the demand where customers ask for more hotels. We have a couple of hotels under construction in Vikhroli and Thane.”

STR’s hotel pipeline data for the Asia Pacific region showed 2,109 projects accounting for 470,650 rooms in construction as of July 2019. Five countries reported more than 20,000 rooms under construction including India where 24,801 rooms, 8.4% of existing supply is under construction. China led with 244,233 rooms, which represented 9.4% of the country’s existing supply and Japan with 43,012 rooms, 6.3% of existing supply.

Out of the 28 Indian cities from where international passengers Embark/ Disembark, Delhi accounts for highest international passenger traffic with a share of 26.6% in quarter one (Q1) of 2019. Five Indian cities accounted for most (approximately 70%) of the international passenger traffic, and after Delhi it was Mumbai (20.4 per cent share) and Chennai (8.8% share). After that was Bengaluru (7.0 %) and Kochi (6.6%). Domestic and foreign carriers connect India to 54 countries through 346 Routes. Out of these routes top 10 Routes accounted for approximately 20 per cent of the total international passenger traffic during the first quarter of the year 2019. Maximum international passengers were carried on the Dubai-Mumbai sector followed by Dubai-Delhi.

Domestic hotel operators dominated signings over international operators with the ratio of 68:32 in the first half (H1) of this year, revealed the Hotel Momentum India (HMI) report released by JLL. The report revealed that 36 per cent of new signings are conversions of old hotels. Also, it was seen that Gujarat had the highest number of branded hotel signings (1593) amongst all states, while West Bengal had highest number of branded hotel openings (926) from January to June, 2019.