To attract more Chinese and Germans tourists, who are among the high spenders on tourism annually, Ministry of Tourism has floated tenders for agencies to convert the Indian tourism website — Incredible India — in all United Nation languages plus four other foreign languages.
Ministry of Tourism has also set themselves a target of six months for the job. “We have also hired translators for converting the website, which is so far accessible in English to five remaining UN languages - Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish along with Japanese, Korean, Italian and German,” said an official from the Tourism Ministry.
“While Chinese and Germans are listed among tourists who spend the most on travelling annually, our data shows that we as a country are very popular with Japanese, Koreans and Russians. This could also be because of our proximity to these countries,” the official said.
latest travel statistics from the World Tourism Organisation show that China became the number one source market in the world with a total abroad travel spending amounting to US$ 102 billion, overtaking Germany and United States of America (both US$84 billion), who are now second and third in the ranking. Russia, Japan and UK also figure in the World 10 spending nations on travel.
“We need to focus on these nations are they are known spenders on travel. Although we are doing road shows and travel campaigns in these countries, but in this age of web, easily accessible information source is the internet. We need to make our website handy for these foreign language speaking countries,” official added.
“We have already floated tenders for the job and we are hoping to meet our six month deadline,” he said.
latest data from the Bureau of Immigration shows that foreign tourist arrivals to India grew by about 4.5 per cent from 6.30 million in 2011 to 6.57 million in 2012.
The top 10 source markets remained the same. The US and the UK were followed by Bangladesh, Sri lanka, Canada, Germany, France, Japan, Australia and Malaysia.
“Ministry of Tourism has fixed target of 12 per cent growth in tourist arrival for the 12th Five Year Plan period. We will continue to make efforts to reach our target,” official said.