Friday, March 23, 2018
Travel And Tour World is in an exclusive conversation with Yuvraj Padole, Deputy Director, Events and Marketing, Madhya Pradesh Tourism Board. In this interaction, he discusses about the interesting tourism potential of this central Indian state, highlighting about major growth areas like ‘wildlife tourism’ at ITB Berlin 2018.
Travel And Tour World: What are your plans for 2018 to promote the tourism sector?
Yuvraj Padole: Well, Madhya Pradesh tourism is consistently doing promotions in domestic and international markets since a long time and we have been associated with leading trade shows like ITB, WTM, ATM. Gradually we have also entered new markets in Australia and the US. So, plans for 2018 are very clear chalked out.
In guidance of our Managing Director Shri Hari Ranjan Rao, we have very clear guidelines about our future policies.
For instance we would focus on wildlife and adventure activities. The year 2018 has been declared by Government of India as year of adventure and it would be starting from next month onwards. Therefore we will be having different activities in the sphere of wildlife tourism and also certain aspects of tourism that will be accomplished from the State. In May we will be making efforts for promoting adventure tourism in Madhya Pradesh because in December we have registered for a very big event. The event would be known as ‘Adventure Next’ that is a part of American Travel Trade Association. They are coming for the very first time in India. Now they have a huge membership and adventure tour operators around 90 countries have their business there.
They are coming here with tour delegates and we are also offering them an opportunity to explore different adventure places and hosting tours. The basic idea is to develop a new kind of segment for adventure tourism in Madhya Pradesh and in 2018 we have different plans to slowly and steadily follow it up.
Travel And Tour World: What is your main marketing in Europe?
Yuvraj Padole: As I said before we have been participating in all major exhibitions and events. We also do roadshows in some of the cities and events from where we get tourists and ITB Berlin that is a very strong event in tourism that gives us great platform to promote our products in European markets. For, you can observe that many tourism-related people from all over Europe have gathered here and it is a very good opportunity we are keen to promote our state. Europe is known to have a very good market in this regard.
Travel And Tour World: Please say something interesting about Madhya Pradesh.
Yuvraj Padole: Well, Madhya Pradesh as the name suggests, has a great geographical advantage as we are situated in the centre of the country and so we are located at central part of India. This gives us a great advantage because traffic from any site (east, west, north and south) comes to Madhya Pradesh anyway.
Secondly it has many other destinations tourist attractions we have three UNESCO World Heritage sites and many people from all across the world visit those places and we are leading the country in terms of wildlife tourism. Also, we are promoting ourselves as heritage destinations.
Furthermore, in the historical destinations and we keep doing some kind of events to promote adventure tourism, nature tourism and nowadays also health tourism. And, new tourism trends are also coming up, for example earlier we used to go to vacations we just used to go relax and spend some time. But now concept is changing to active holidays. For instance we go for bicycling and you can go trekking, boating, swimming, people are not willing just to relax but also some activities there so active holiday trends coming up to welcome to visit Madhya Pradesh and enjoy the hospitality.
Monday, January 1, 2024
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