TravTalk India Online Magazine
Venkatesan Dhattareyan, Regional Director, India Tourism (Western and Central Region) says travel and hospitality trade associations have a key role to play in promoting the destination.
Hazel Jain
Venkatesan Dhattareyan, Regional Director, India Tourism (Western and Central Region) says, “All the travel and hospitality trade associations are our equal partners when it comes to marketing and promoting the destination. As the ministry, we can create demand but selling happens only through the service providers. So, we continuously engage with them. Recently, we have also engaged with state governments. The state of Punjab was in Ahmedabad and Mumbai recently where we supported an exclusive roadshow with them in both cities. We have also supported a group of tour operators from Tamil Nadu for a multi-city roadshow.”
He recently also met the new office-bearers of Maharashtra Tour Organisers’ Association (MTOA) to discuss how Maharashtra can be promoted in other states. His focus for the last many months has been to encourage the travel trade to register with the MoT website. “It is also a continuous process. We want them to come into the mainstream by being recognised by the MoT because it brings them a lot of tangible and intangible benefits. This has been accepted by them and we see the number of people applying for it increase,” he says.
This is not all. He has also been promoting MoT’s scheme that the trade associations can avail for their own MICE requirements. “We want the national trade associations to have their major flagship events within India rather than take it outside the country. In fact, the MoT has a scheme that supports the activities of national trade associations of both travel and hospitality industries – where the government provides financial support for organising their annual conventions. The quantum of support depends on the size of the membership. These details are available on the MoT’s website and various associations have benefited from this scheme,” he says.
Regional efforts
His team recently conducted a workshop for the bed and breakfast owners of homestays at Devbagh beach in Sindhudurg district in Maharashtra.
“This is one area which has more than 1,000 homestays and they are the main kind of accommodation providers there. But many of them are in the unorganised sector. So, we joined hands with the Sindhudurg Vyavasay Paryatan Mahasangh, which works for tourism; we conducted a one-day workshop in which we had sessions on best practices and housekeeping, hygiene practices, behavioural skills, as well as responsible and sustainable tourism practices,” he says.
Besides, he also introduced them to the Ministry of Tourism’s common standards for classification of homestays and B&Bs. “It was well attended – almost 125 owners participated and we brought them into the organised sector,” Dhattareyan’s says.
