The government is revamping its strategy to market India as a preferred destination for both foreign as well as domestic tourists, with an eye on doubling traffic from both segments.
A fresh Incredible India 2.0 campaign, backed by an interactive new website on India's tourism hotspots are in the works and expected to be launched by September 27 this year, marked as World Tourism Day.
“We are working on a lot of things. We will revamp our whole marketing campaign… To start with, we will rebuild our website. The current website is static,” Tourism Secretary Rashmi Verma told The Hindu .
“We are also looking at crowd-sourcing content… blogs and comments, including on social networking sites, about a particular place will be also put up on the site,” she added.
Ms. Verma said the new website will be highly interactive and will act as one-stop solution for information on any interesting place that a tourist might want to visit.
She added that while they are looking to increase the number of tourists from existing foreign markets, the focus will also be on doubling the number of domestic travellers.
“Tourism in the country has so much potential. Till now, domestic tourism has been the weak link…it is a low hanging fruit,” she said, adding that so far, only independent campaigns by select States have attracted local tourists.
The ministry wants to now also promote domestic tourism at central level, and will push its regional offices to contribute to the same.
“We will give our regional offices some targets…we want to double the number of domestic tourists,” Ms. Verma said.
