Are vital
The pandemic seems to have forced Goa Tourism to do some house-cleaning and relook at tackling short and longterm issues such as curbing illegal hotels and improving data collection.
Menino D’souza, Director, Department of Tourism, Government of Goa, said during a recent webinar that his department will be looking at tackling fundamental issues both in the shortterm and long-term. “One good thing that is coming out of COVID-19 that we will also adopt for the future is making pre-bookings of hotels mandatory for tourists entering the state. We are looking at maintaining this system to curb mass tourism that Goa is attracting,” he said. D’souza also brought up the issue of collecting statistics. “Currently, we don’t have an accurate data for tourist numbers. The process we are following now is not correct. According to that, we have 80 lakh tourists coming to Goa every year. Figures show that we receive more than a crore of tourists into Goa. So we are putting a new software in place to resolve this,” he shared.
Underlining the need to curb illegal businesses, D’souza said that his department has proposed an amendment to make the process of registering easier. “We need to protect our brand and profits need to seep down. But if demand is not met legally, it is met illegally and rightful
Hotels in the state have been open since July 8, but restaurants have not yet been given the permission to do so. We have been trying to convince the Central & state governments to permit restaurants to open. We have submitted elaborate presentations outlining all the safety and precautionary measures that restaurants will voluntarily adopt to ensure social distancing. Ideally, restaurants could have begun operations along with hotels if not earlier. Hotels occupancies in the state are in single digits i.e. below 10 per cent, but we are hopeful. Hotels occupancies in these months usually are low, but post-September we are hoping for it to go up. Also, we are receiving a steady trickle in booking enquiries, so until September, it is mostly a wait and watch game.