Bengaluru, February 10, 2016: Indian tourism industry provides vast opportunities for development in all aspects of tourism; business, medical, sports, education and culture and heritage. Culture and heritage tourism not only a provider of livelihood options for millions and thus a star earner for the nation but also enhance the value of brand India. Promotion of culture and heritage tourism can be broadly divided into three phases.
The first phase involves creating understanding and presenting adequate information to be able to produce interest amongst the public to generate a ‘desire’ to travel to the destinations being promoted. Over the years, a significant amount of effort has been invested towards this objective by the government, the hotels, travel agencies and other tourism related ventures through their websites, playing a key role in presenting the information. However there is a lot of room for improvement in promoting the not so popular but several valuable heritage sites with authentic background information packaged such that it creates curiosity and excitement amongst the potential visitors.
The second phase involves creating the ‘aha experience’ during the visit. Except for some of the tourist guides, most people engaged with receiving tourists are not provided with specialised training that would make them competent to deliver the superior experience. Such training can be delivered through e-learning and remote tutoring. While most of our museums are not equipped with appropriate demonstration or presentation tools, in several of these museums where such facilities are provided, sadly they are not functional. Despite efforts put into training and certifying the guides in some places, regular up gradation of their knowledge and testing their levels of knowledge from time to time is not being done systematically.
The third phase involves ensuring continued affinity with the site/s visited and encouraging the visitors to keep their memories of the visit intact. Several international museums have been successful in encouraging repeat visit to the museums on the strength of unique themes and presenting hitherto little known dimensions of history through relevant artefacts and communication tools. For travellers from long distances, the continued connectedness with the sites visited could be achieved through free updates, engaging with the visitors through social media for their suggestions and ideas for enhancing the visitor experience or providing fee based new services such as special video lectures on new findings, new books or offers for visits to related sites. This would require maintenance of proper database and permissions of the visitors to send them information in future.
In order to realize the true potential of Brand India and its rich heritage, it would be meaningful to start by drawing up a strategic plan and thereafter engage with all stakeholders to become active change agents and share the excitement of incredible India with the rest of the world.
Corporate Comm India(CCI Newswire)
