Tourism : Promotional Perspectives & Issues

The recent change in the image of India due to information technology revolution has put India into the limelight. The country has become a destination for the whole gamut of travellers, from businessmen to cultural enthusiast. Despite being endowed with a wide variety of geographical, historical, religious and cultural tourist spots, we could not develop the tourism sector as a major revenue earner ever after many decades of Independence. By and large, Indian tourism, till the recent past could not realise its true potential. Many factors contributed to this below par performance, such as underdeveloped tourism infrastructure, insufficient budget allocation, lack of planned vision, and above all, lack of effective promotional measures. However, the scenario turned a 360-degree swing with all the lacking factors slowly falling into place. Increased allocation of resources, special impetus to promotion and development of tourism infrastructure caused this desired shift. Presently, Indian tourism is one of the largest sectors in the Indian economy and contributing sizeably to its GDP. Destination marketing occupies new prominence in the fast changing techno-socio-political- economic conditions. Growth of technology in the form of proliferation of Internet and web technologies, on the one had, and globalisation of economies, on the other hand, has opened up plenty of new opportunities for the destination marketers. As seeing is believing, many new forms of promotion have come into the picture as a result. Many new tourism products have been evolved such as medical tourism, sports tourism, shopping tourism, ecotourism and religious tourism and new means of promotion have been developed, such as development of interactive websites, events organisation, In-film advertisements etc. This is a new beginning for tourism as a whole, especially for tourism marketers. Responsible marketing has become a necessity for the growth of Indian tourism sector in line with the expectations. Designing effective tourism marketing mix, of which promotion plays a very important role, is a challenging job for tourism marketers in the new millennium, especially taking the prevailing socio-economic and political factors into consideration. To create a feel for destination and build traffic promotion is a crucial tool for efficacy in marketing tourism.