World Travel Market London 2015 is delighted to announce India Tourism as the sponsor of its prestigious WTM Buyers’ Club as it looks to promote India to the global travel industry as a safe and year-round luxury destination.
In 2014, 7.7 million tourists visited India, a growth of more than 10% from just under seven million (6.97m) in 2013. In the first six months of 2015 the country welcomed 3.85 million tourists, up 3.4% on the same six months in 2014.
India is looking to increase its tourism numbers further by enticing tour operators from global source markets to promote the country as a year round luxury destination. The key to India’s strategy is to focus on a variety of niche products – including; rural, wellness, medical, adventure, golf, MICE and cruise tourism –to overcome the aspect of ‘seasonality’ spread tourists around the country by promoting India as a 365 days destination, and expanding out from its most popular period of October to March.
India’s most popular destinations are Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, popularly known as the Golden Triangle, Rajasthan, Goa, Kerala and Kashmir. However, a greater focus is being put on North East India – Assam, Meghalaya, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Tripura and Mizoram.
Furthermore, India has an array of new products to promote to the world’s leading buyers at WTM London 2015; including the development of its cruise industry, which will see Royal Caribbean include Indian ports in its itineraries from October. Other leading global cruise companies operating from India include Oceania Cruise and AIDA Cruise.
A string of luxury global hotel chains including Rotana, Meininger, Jumeirah and Six Senses are scheduled to open a number of hotels in the next two years, further enhancing India’s position as a luxury destination.
The UK is India’s second largest source market for tourists with 810,000 people visiting in 2014. India will look to sign deals at WTM 2015 with UK tour operators that will see the number of visitors from the country increase to one million in 2016.
Key to the strategy of increasing tourists from the UK is for India to expand its campaign to people living outside of London, with the belief that the close links between the two countries and their cultures will encourage repeat visitors.
There are currently 17 flights from the UK to India every day, from a variety of airlines including British Airways, Air India, Jet Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Bicester Airlines.
As Dr. Lalit Panwar, Secretary (Tourism), Government of India said, “India is very happy to be sponsoring the WTM Buyers’ Club for WTM London 2015. The objective of the Ministry of Tourism is to promote India as a year round luxury destination through its vibrant destinations and tourism products and to increase tourist traffic to the country. There is an ever-increasing amount of new and exciting products to educate the world’s leading buyers about. WTM London is an event when the Indian tourism stakeholders get to meet the world’s buyers and sign business agreements. The Ministry of Tourism and the Indian exhibitors look forward to a very successful WTM London 2015.”
WTM London, Senior Director, Simon Press, said: “WTM London will host more than 9,000 of the world’s most important buyers through the WTM Buyers’ Club. These buyers will sign deals worth more than £2.5 million with exhibitors. India is in prime position to promote its exciting range of tourism products to these buyers through its sponsorship of the WTM Buyers’ Club.”
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World Travel Market London
World Travel Market London, the leading global event for the travel industry, is the must-attend four-day business-to-business exhibition for the worldwide travel and tourism industry.
Almost 51,500 senior travel industry professionals, government ministers and international press, embark on ExCeL – London every November to network, negotiate and discover the latest industry opinion and trends at WTM London.
WTM London, now in its 36th year, is the event where the travel industry conducts and concludes its deals.
WTM London 2014 will generate around £2.5 billion of travel industry contracts.
World Travel Market
World Travel Market is comprised of the leading leisure travel events in the world; WTM London, WTM Latin America in Sao Paulo, WTM Africa in Cape Town and Arabian Travel Market in Dubai.
New events for 2016 are WTM connect Asia and WTM connect China, which join WTM connect Ski and International Golf Travel Market. These unique one-to-one events are targeted at leisure and niche travel markets, allowing exhibitors to exclusively meet with elite hosted buyers.
The World Travel Market events are attended by the global travel and tourism industry’s senior executives to conduct business deals and discover the latest research, insight and opinion.
In 2014, World Travel Market events facilitated around $7 billion in industry deals from negotiations between the more than 15,000 buyers, 9,500 exhibitors (1,500 main stand holders and 8,000 stand sharers) in attendance of its four events. WTM is owned by the world’s leading events organiser Reed Exhibitions.
Reed Travel Exhibitions
Reed Travel Exhibitions (RTE) is the world’s leading travel and tourism events organiser, with a wide-ranging portfolio of 22 international events in 13 countries throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Africa. Its market-leading, business-to-business events cover all elements of travel and tourism, including leisure travel, luxury travel, meetings, events, incentives and business travel, as well as golf and ski travel.
RTE is part of Reed Exhibitions.
About Reed Exhibitions
Reed Exhibitions is the world’s leading events organiser, with over 500 events in 43 countries. In 2014 Reed brought together over seven million event participants from around the world generating billions of dollars in business. Today Reed events are held throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Africa and organised by 41 fully staffed offices. Reed Exhibitions serves 43 industry sectors with trade and consumer events. It is part of the RELX Group plc, a world-leading provider of information solutions for professional customers across industries.