Foreign tourists find India all booked up

Leading tour operators are now turning back travellers planning to visit India, with airlines and hotels reporting full occupancy.

"All tour operators have turned down around 30 per cent business," Cox & Kings global CEO Peter Kerkar told the Business Standard. "We had done bookings for January to March by December last year. There is a shortage of hotel rooms in Jaipur, Kerala and some places in Delhi as well as of airline seats," he said.

SITA Travels too has had to say no to inbound tourist groups. According to Himmat Anand, COO (inbound travel), the company has had nearly ten such cases in the last few months. But he is not complaining.

"In January we've handled nearly 13,000 tourists, which is double of what we did in the same month last year," Anand said. If the remaining months of the year live up to the expected levels, SITA will have nearly 100,000 tourists, up from 65,000 in 2003.

The tourist traffic to India has surpassed all projections. "There has been an increase of 20-25 per cent in terms of tourist arrivals in the country over last year. All the luxury hotels in the metros and major tourist destinations like Rajasthan, Goa and Kerala are reporting nearly 100 per cent occupancy," said Subhash Goyal, Stic Travels.

Goyal, however, flays the hotels for increasing their tariffs by 50-75 per cent. "Our relatively low pricing is an advantage. It will be against the national interest to increase rates during the season. The hotels will end up killing a golden goose," he said.

Kerkar said the shortage of rooms had risen as hotels had sold aggressively in the domestic market, especially to corporates, before the current rush took off.

As a result, these hotels were not able to spare rooms for overseas travellers, he added.

According to Kerkar, Cox & Kings is already seeing a lot of bookings for the next busy season, which begins in October this year. "Delhi is already booked up," he said. Kerkar added that there was a renewed interest amongst foreigners to travel to Kashmir during the summer months.

"But unless the governments in the West lift their travel advisories on Kashmir, we cannot go ahead with the bookings," he said.