Travel Marts, Road shows fail to woo tourists

Despite Jammu and Kashmir Tourism department organizing ten road shows in different states during the past few months, the number of tourists visiting Kashmir has not picked up till date.
Stakeholders and the officials of the Tourism department claim that the aftershocks of five-month long 2016 summer unrest are still being felt and these have brought down the tourist influx to zero.
As per Tourism officials and stakeholders, the Tourism department along with local stakeholders organized road shows and participated in travel marts at Lucknow, Kochi, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Indore, Ahmedabad, New Delhi, Pune and Chandigarh. However, the promotional efforts had a little impact on the ground. “Damage done to the Tourism sector by the unrest after killing of Burhan Wani last year is immense,” said an official.
“Although department spent crores to facilitate visit of officials for promotional campaign, there is hardly any impact as Kashmir tourism needs sustained media promotional campaigns. Officials visiting outside states won’t help anyone’s cause,” he said.
The stakeholders said, “They (tourism traders) of Gujarat are not ready to promote Kashmir and even they boycotted our road shows. Kashmir used to receive good number of visitors from Gujarat every year.”
“There is little business in comparison to March last year,” said President KHAROF, Javed Burza adding that they are trying their best to promote Kashmir and have participated in several road shows. “The tourist arrivals haven’t picked up,” he said.
The President, Travel Agents Society of Kashmir, Manzoor Dug said the government and tourism traders are doing their best to remove negative perception about Kashmir. “We are hopeful that in coming months tourist arrival will pick up, but right now situation is gloomy,” he said adding occupancy in hotels and houseboats is not even 30 percent.
Talking to Kashmir Post, Director Tourism Kashmir, Mehmood Shah said tourism department’s promotional campaign is all time high this time post last year’s unrest. “Never has Tourism department participated in so many tourism promotional events,” he said adding that department at the same time is organizing sustained media campaigns across India.
“Today we had published advertisement of Tulip Garden’s opening in all major national and regional newspapers,” he said adding that Kashmir is a brand in itself but unfortunate incidents give bad name to the place otherwise Kashmir doesn’t need promotion. He admitted that arrival of tourists in comparison to previous years this time is less but expressed optimistic that it would pick up in future. He lauded the efforts of the tourism players in promoting and participating in outside road shows and marts to woo backpackers to Kashmir.