Promoting safe, satisfying and fulfilling visitor experiences, ensuring environmental and cultural protection, strengthening biodiversity, and providing employment opportunities and fair pay are some of the strategies for sustainable tourism laid down in the Kerala Perspective Plan-2030 unveiled here recently by the State Planning Board.
Tourism ventures should be initiated involving all stakeholders including the community where the development is taking place.
Tourism should provide quality services and generate demand for high value-added services and unique experiences with high brand value-added services.
Tourism has entered the age of the experience economy.
There is a growing segment of tourists —sophisticated, experiences and discriminating — who are less destination-oriented and more experience-oriented. The Green Leaf and Olive Leaf classification programme for Ayurveda tourism centres must be monitored carefully so that Kerala does not get any negative publicity due to fake Ayurveda centres. Kerala has a distinct advantage in dental tourism.
The fact that dental treatment requires multiple sittings with gaps in between implies that a patient would have to stay in Kerala for 30 to 40 days.
This makes that patient an ideal candidate for medical tourism.
Hence, more efforts must be made to market dental tourism, KPP-2030 says.
Kerala’s wetlands offer significant tourism opportunities; it is not only a key source of income but also contributes to wetland conservation.
Best practices in this sector involving local communities in decision-making and making appropriate legislation and ensuring its effective enforcement to prevent damages to environmental and tourism assets.
Promotion abroad
The State needs to explore new emerging international markets; the product-specific promotion of tourism such as Ayurveda in Germany and culture in France needs to be replicated in other countries. An informed tourism policy has to be supported by rigorous research.
The KPP-2030 advocates two approaches for this; conversion of either the KITTS, KIHMS or the IHMCT into a full-fledged research institute and the institution of a tourism research chair at a premier research institute such as the Centre for Development Studies or the Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation.
Planning Board lays emphasis on medical and wetland tourism in an ‘experience-oriented’ scheme.
