By IANS,
Panaji : The ‘Incredible India’ campaign, a branding exercise by the tourism ministry to create a distinctive identity for the country, must be “reinvented”, a tourism industry stakeholder said Saturday, while another felt the government must focus on social media to attract more tourists.
“The Incredible India campaign has lived its life and it needs to be reinvented now,” said Arjun Sharma, managing director of Le Passage to India, a leading destination management company.
The landmark campaign had helped increase the inflow of international tourists from “two, three million to five million”, Sharma said during an interactive session on “Marketing And Innovation In Tourism” at the Goa International Travel Mart.
The decision of the central government to increase the budget for tourism from $ 1 billion to $ 5 billion was heart-warming, Sharma said.
“The target must be to increase the number of tourists coming to India to one percent of the world tourist population, which is about 12 million tourists,” Sharma said.
A significant chunk of the revenue spent by the central government to promote tourism must be online on social media platforms, where the “tourists actually are”, said Nikhil Ganju, country manager of www.TripAdvisor.com, a leading travel and social media website.
The ‘Incredible India’ campaign won the World Travel Award 2009 for being the best campaign of the year.