Goa tourism department is anticipating a 30 per cent rise in arrival of chartered flights during the upcoming tourist season, crossing 1,000 mark.
“Due to the ongoing Ukraine-Russia crisis, there are talks of some tour operators going bankrupt. But it is not going to seriously affect tourist inflow in Goa,” State Tourism Director Amey Abhyankar, said on Saturday.
He said they are expecting 1,200 chartered flight arrivals this year against last year’s 900.
The first chartered flight of the current season is expected arrive in the first week of October.
Mr. Abhyankar said that the arrivals in Goa are largely from Russia, Germany, UK and other European countries.
The director said that the upcoming exposition of relics of St Francis Xavier scheduled to start from November and continue till January next year, will bring in four million tourists, exclusively for the religious event.
“I don’t think that there would be any major hit on Goa’s tourism due to international circumstances. I can’t give you accurate figure but compared to last year we should see a rise,” he said.
The state government, he said, is also in the process of preparing tourism master plan which provides a specific focus on the industry.
“We are putting up master plan for tourism and have joined hands with consulting firm KPMG. It will have planning phases which would last for 38 months and it would then spread over 60 months for implementation,” he said.
He said the plan will help to connect with areas that are likely to be developed in terms of tourist infrastructure, he added.
“As of now we don’t have a plan. The master plan will bring a perspective. It will tell us where we want to take the tourism to and how we would we want to brand it. The kind of activities, tourism related events that we want to conduct,” Mr. Abhyankar said.
