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Boosting membership and its upcoming convention, are few of the things that IATO is focusing on, reveals Lally Matthews, Honorary Secretary, IATO.
It’s only been a month after the elections and IATO is already in action. “There has only been one Executive Committee meeting after the elections, and we have already started work on a few things,” says Matthews. Elaborating further he says, “The enquiries that come on the Ministry of Tourism (MOT) website have been connected to the IATO system for the last two years. All these enquiries are supposed to be distributed on rotation to every five IATO members. However, before elections we have had members coming to us saying that either they have not got any enquiries or have only got requests from domestic market. Hence, a committee has been constituted under me that will look into it and see where the problem is and get it rectified.” The next thing on IATO’s agenda is to increase the number of members. Matthews says, “Being there for more than 25 years, IATO only has 344 active members. There are a huge number of allied members as well. How- ever, now we are on a drive to increase membership of IATO all over India and in the last EC meeting we had decided that for the North East states, and Andaman & Nicobar, we will waive off the registration fee of 5000 till March 31, 2017. In addition, we have written to our chapter chairmen to focus on increasing the membership. However, we have to be careful since many operators can default as well.”
He also said that one of the priorities for them is to work on the convention. “There hasn’t been a date and venue for this year’s convention because of the elections. While the team was contemplating to do it in Chennai, nothing has been decided as yet. Our first priority is to block the dates and then we will decide on the venue.” He also added, “We are also looking at making an all women committee, apart from reshuffling the earlier committees.”
For the North East, and Andaman & Nicobar, we will waive off the registration fee of ` 5000 till March 31, 2017