Unique city image, branding, and slogans can boost Indian local tourism industry

The recent budget by the Government of India emphasises developing a complete package for a tourist destination, and at least 50 such tourist destinations are proposed to be developed through an innovative and integrated approach immediately. This seems to be a great step in the right direction. In this endeavour, our key focus should be to develop the respective Indian tourist centre into an up-market tourist destination and to attract tourists to stay longer and spend more, making use of tourism for social-economic development in a sustainable manner. Further, focus may also be on increasing tourism income of that particular region as well as bringing more development opportunities by incorporating the best practices across the World. Thus, the key objective is to devise a package for sustainable Tourism development in the short run with action plans and timelines. As evidenced from various studies, the root causes of sustainable Tourism constraints generally identified in Indian tourist centres could be summarised basically under three broad areas; (a) lack of Tourism branding and marketing (b) limited infrastructure capacity, (c) lack of qualified human resources. The other issues such as inadequate public financial resources for upgrading tourism facilities, hygiene issues, weak coordination between public and private sectors, and among different departments within the public sector are either structural issues or are subsidiary to the three basic issues highlighted above. Though India has a broad national tourism image, Indian local tourism at present lacks a “unique city image”, “branding” and “slogan”. This ultimately leads to lack of proper knowledge about the tourist destination resulting in slow growth of tourists. This necessitates implementation of “finding target cities” for propagation and promotion activities. The other inevitable component is for infrastructure investment especially in “road” and “airport” and on developing Indian tourist centres as a new transit city like Singapore where more emphasis is given on improving ‘Mobility’ and ‘Accessibility’. Thankfully, the infrastructure development is very much happening in India, however, the tourist centres may need more emphasis. Tourism Human Resource Development and Management components need to focus on improving the quality of teachers in tourism higher education, developing the curriculum based on regional common standards as well as integrated with Indian standards, strengthening the relationship between higher education system and tourism industry etc. As three key problems are identified as above with policy alternatives, we need to choose one alternative from a set of alternatives mentioned above with more focus on a key tourism issue. The objective to be focussed is on more net benefits and more output with a given level of input with effective cost assessment. In this scenario, from the three policy alternatives, we need to select the alternative which brings the most benefit to the tourism industry with a given level of amount invested. From implementation point of view to get quick results, the policy alternative “Tourism Promotion” is more efficient, with less cost, high effectiveness and high administrative operability whereas the other alternatives such as “Infrastructure investment” and “Tourism Human Resource Development and Management” are either ranking comparatively inferior in all or either of the criterion. The infrastructure investment involves activities to be undertaken in the long run with long run results with high investment. Similarly, focusing uniquely on tourism human resource development and management may not provide best results in the short run. Through implementation of the best policy alternative ‘tourism promotion’, respective state /city tourism departments could attract more tourists thereby solving the key as well as subsidiary tourism issues, which hamper the sustainable development of tourism in the region. With successful tourism promotion, the number of international tourists as also the tourism income of the region will increase. This tourism revenue generated by the local administrative state/city units could be productively used for infrastructure investment in the region, especially the development of transit cities, as also upgrading the basic road and airport infrastructure. Further, when there is a sustainable increase of tourists in the region, it generates demand for tourism related courses, resulting in an increase in the number of practitioners in tourism-related industries. Considering the profitability of the tourism related industries, it will attract more practitioners to join the tourism industry. The practitioners will have strong motivation to learn foreign languages ​​and update their services to earn more profits, thus the hygiene and language problems will get indirectly solved. Thus, by sustained increase in the number of tourists, the overall quality of the tourism industry could be improved. The improvement of the quality of tourism shall further promote the growth of the sector, attract more tourists, increase the length of tourists stay, as also the money spent by Tourists, thus forming a vicious circle. Thus, “Tourism promotion activities” could help solve to a great extent the problems we have identified in Indian local Tourism, in the short run. Thus, the proposed 50 centres to be identified as announced in the Budget may need to integrate online and offline promotions and fully utilise an integrated strategy of going out and bringing in simultaneously, tailoring promotion schemes and apply different intermediaries for different targeted groups for comprehensive and intensive Promotion. What is the unique scenery in a particular tourist region, or what can tourists only experience in that region, is the most important selling point that the tourism department of these centres needs to look for. Lastly, establishing city branding with unique features, targeting major tourist sources for accurate promotion, and adopting comprehensive and intensive promotion are the keys to the growth of tourism as a livelihood. The author serves as Civil Servant at Indian Ministry of Finance. Views are personal. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. 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