India tops in the UK
Sandie Dawe, CEO, Visit Britain explained how Visitbritain got its forecast right during the London Olymics. Moreover, India has emerged as top growth market but, Dawe feels that much more needs to be done to take the figures up.
VIVEK SETHI With
over two decades of experience in promoting Britain, Dawe has full confidence on tourism as it helps in growing economy and in generating employment. In an exclusive conversation, she touched upon the pertinent issues that are changing the tourism industry world over. Here are the selected excerpts:- time experience and hence stay longer.
India has been the best performing market with 23 per cent growth in the second quarter (April-June) this year. We intend to grow the number of Indian tourists to half a million from 3,55,000 by 2020.
India has been the best performing market with 23 per cent growth in the second quarter (April-June) this year
Starting January 2013, in first- of- its- kind partnership with an online Indian player, VisitBritan announced that they had partnered Yatra. com to launch a special campaign during the period of January-March 2013. It will feature the celebrity Salman Khan and feature some special itineraries, which Yatra. com is working out with the help of private sector in Britain.
The games experience has matched our projection and forecasts based on the research done on experience of the previous host countries. In fact, we had faired a tad better, as our forecast suggested about 6,00,000 visitors to London specifically for games and the official estimates suggest that there were 5,90,000 visitors. We knew that the numbers went down by 5 per cent, but the expenditure rose by over 9 per cent.
The big achievement for us during the games had been the huge broadcast and awareness generated over the normal pre and post games, which we’ll use to convert viewers into visitors.
The economic situation has been a real concern with near zero growth in our economy. However, the inbound tourism growth in the previous year had been 7 per cent in value, while it has been 3 per cent in the present year, so far. Hence, we have made a strong case with our government, highlighting the growth and employment generation potential of tourism. Our chairman has also been actively involved in building a case with our government and in the T-20 nations. We have put forth many things with the government in terms of future aviation capacity, more runways, visa and taxation to more aggressively tap the South East Asia.