Post-lockdown, a staggered and multi-stage action plan has been conceived by the State Tourism Department to shore up the sector which generates 3.5 million direct and indirect jobs and accounts for 14.8 per cent of the Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP).
The focus will be on hyper-local tourism to encourage both intra-district and inter-district travels in the first stage followed by encouraging inter-State and international tourism in the subsequent stages. The first stage of intra-district promotional drive will be to encourage people to dine out within the city and modelled after Love Your Local campaign of Singapore to put the derailed sector back on track.
“Survival first followed by revival is how we are looking at the tourism sector which has completely collapsed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in lakhs of job losses across the State,” said Kumar Pushkar, MD, Karnataka State Tourism Development Corporation (KSTDC).
He told The Hindu that online and virtual meetings have been conducted with the stakeholders on reviving the sector besides eliciting their suggestions. “We have a strategy ready to be implemented when the lockdown is lifted and the sector opens up’, he added.
The challenge is to infuse confidence among the tourists of the safety and hygiene that will be in place in the post-COVID-19 pandemic world and these two elements will be the tagline of the promotional drive. The Tourism Department will tap social media to send messages to the target audience to build up the tempo for revival of the secStor, said Mr. Pushkar.
Promoting MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions) tourism will be part of the revival scheme apart from promoting wellness tourism and marketing adventure sports in the State. Tourism Minister C.T. Ravi and other officials of the department will also participate in the meeting of the National Tourism Task Force constituted by the Centre to revive the sector.
The stakeholders on their part have sought a moratorium on loan repayment for at least one year, a tax holiday for one year and a reduction in the GST slabs for hotels and restaurants, entry tax waiver for tourist vehicles coming into the State for one year, soft loans etc.
This is to make travel affordable because tourists too will be hard-pressed to pay the normal rates as the impact of the COVID-19 has spared none, according to the industry representatives.
K.S.Nagapati, a subject expert and author of tourism-related books, said the demands of the stakeholders are genuine as the sector needs short, medium and long-term measures for revival.
But for the government, which is also falling short of revenue due to the shrinking of the economy, it is a tough balancing act to placate the demands of various sectors all of which are in the doldrums, he added.
