Potential and the Future of the Travel industry in India

The Novel Corona Virus (COVID-19) has changed the world as it was the world as usual. Economies of the majority of nations have drop-down while the situation among poor or developing nations is even worse. Since peoples are avoiding travel in order to maintain social distance hence Travel and tourism industry is a highly affected industry. The majority of worldwide airlines, travel companies, tour operators, and other wings associated with The travel and tourism industry are struggling to survive in this pandemic era. A lot of peoples have lost their jobs as organizations are operating with minimal bandwidth and are getting lean.

A report about India’s online travel agency market indicates that 58% of market share is solely acquired by India’s OTA leader (Source: Kalagato, 2017).

Internet penetration is rapidly increasing in our country, As of today, We are the second largest online country in the world.

Under the so-called campaign “Digital India” our government needs to focus more on providing/spreading technology, let’s discuss about this in brief:

During the COVID crisis most of the service men’s are working remotely (Work from home).

Over 100.8 million peoples from the travel sector have already lost their jobs globally (Source: Statistia, 2020). We have the opportunity to revive the industry by looking for alternate ways to promote tourism (WFH tourism) though I was able to find the majority of initiatives from small property owners followed by a few SMEs while the initiative to promote WFH tourism is completely missing from Govt. tourism boards and travel leaders.

The additional major finding also elaborate the further scope of improvement wherein our government needs to work upon in order to make India a Digital country in real terms.

In reference to a report published by TRAI, The raw data indicates that 62% of internet users are based in the Top 9 territories of the nation itself (Source: The Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicators, 2020).

That could be one of the reason that the government is not promoting WFH tourism to not to reveal that the Internet connectivity is still not up to the mark in several parts of the country.

On a parallel track, we portray that we are the second largest online country in the world though another fact is that Internet penetration is even less than 50% in our nation due to the lack of digital infrastructure.

 

Future of the Travel industry

Pandemic is for a short duration though its impact would be for the long term i.e. Technology may eat future jobs.

COVID has left the Travel industry with no choice other than depending on technology.

A recent example from the collapse of Thomas Cook U.K. demonstrates the consequences of not going along with the flow.

85% of travel businesses are run by SMEs in India who face several obstacles while going digital which includes
- High speed internet (connectivity is still not up to the mark in several parts of the country)
- Financial obstacles
- Skills
- Training
and so on ..........

Government should take initiatives by assisting Travel related SMEs in order to achieve goals under campaign "Digital India" else we won’t be able to give head to head competition to the developed nations.

Source: Statista.com

That goes without saying that business travel is going to reduce for sure as COVID has taught every organization to work remotely and digital meetings save time and money both.

Leisure travel will possibly increase post-COVID as people's are fed up sitting idle in their homes, that's what happened post 2^nd world war as well

Hence the need of an hour is to focus on different verticals of leisure tourism. That’s really unfair that India has a coastal line of more than 7500 Kms while popular destinations are just Goa and few parts of Kerala.

 

Feel free to approach me for further discussion/information related to different verticals of the blog i.e. WFH destinations in India, State-wise internet penetration in India, Potential of Domestic tourism in India.

Available for discussions at prateeksapra.p@gmail.com.