US $700 US $1220

This year, we will promote Thailand through our campaign, Discover Thainess, which means we are promoting Thai culture and Thai food. To this effect, we organised a ladies’ lunch in Delhi to promote and create awareness about Thai culture, Thai food and here the ladies also had an opportunity to learn about Thai fruit and vegetable carving and how to make Thai desserts. We would also like to focus on women travellers. One of our strategies this year is to attract solo women travellers.

QThailand

has always been a favourite destination for Indians, how was the response from Indian tourists in 2014? Did you notice a new trend among Indian travellers?

The number of Indian travellers to Thailand touched almost 1 million in 2014. But the most important thing that we noticed last year was the average spend of Indian travellers to Thailand had skyrocketed. In 2013, we got US$ 700 per trip per traveller, however, in 2014, it went up to US$ 1220. We are very happy with this development, this shows we have been successful in promoting luxury travel and we want to further increase the spend of the luxury travellers. We are very seriously focussing on luxury travel as we know that Indian tourists want to travel luxuriously.

QWhat

are your other marketing initiatives for 2015?

The marketing campaign is mainly Discover Thainess, but we have many activities to follow up, and of course, we are participating at various marts. We have also selected Mary Kom as the brand ambassador of Thai boxing (Muay Thai) in India. We are very happy that we got her onboard; she loves Thailand and she likes Thai boxing. I'm happy she accepted my invitation to be the brand ambassador for Thai boxing. We target to increase Indian arrivals to 1.05 million in 2015, and we want to increase the spending power of our travellers.

We are still focussing on Tier- 2 and Tier- 3 cities. We want to create awareness about the destination in these cities. And in the metro cities, we want to focus more on luxury travellers, solo women travellers and student groups as well as wedding and honeymooners. Thailand is very popular for Indian weddings and we are aggres-