Identifying opportunities for Indian hospitality industry

Abstract

Abstract The travel and tourism sector creates more jobs per million rupees investment than any other sector in the economy and is capable of providing employment to wide spectrum of job seekers from the unskilled to the specialized, even in the remote parts of the country. According to WTTC, Indian tourism will contribute Rs 8,50000 crores to the Indian GDP by 2020. WTTC has identified India as the world’s foremost tourist growth centers in the coming decade. The interest in rural and ethnic tourism, cultural tourism, spiritualism, eco-tourism, sports and adventure holidays favor India due to its natural advantages in these areas. However, this sector is currently very unorganized and there are huge opportunities, which if tapped correctly can contribute significantly to the Indian economy. Through this research, we intend to explore the gap between most favored destinations and India’s perception as a tourist destination. We have also analyzed the motivation to travel. It was ascertained that India receives higher number of travelers who are basically imitators and hence, it is necessary to satisfy the incoming travelers to the maximum so that they refer this country to their friends. We have tried to address this gap through some marketing and brand promotional strategies. It was found that India has three major attributes “explore”, “invigorate” and “discover oneself” - to offer travelers, which emerged in the Factor Analysis. Through this research, we propose to explore the information gap existing in the tourism sector. In this Internet era, very less has been done towards developing information systems for Indian tourism. Lack of integrated systems that help tourists in booking hotels, for e.g. is either absent or exist in ineffective form. Countries stereotyping was developed as perceived by the foreigners and this helped us in identifying why some countries are able to attract maximum travelers. The most favored destination as Australia and New Zealand were then justified based on these findings. This report provides an insight into traveler’s motivation for their selection of these destination.