Kerala Tourism has decided to strengthen its online campaign this year through the official tourism website as well as social media promotions as it feels more and more tourists are choosing their travel destinations through online searches.
S Harikishore, director, Kerala Tourism, said, "Earlier around 90% of the tourist inflow was through tour operators, however, in recent years we have noticed that around 60% of tourists would come through operators while about 40% are those who have learnt about the state through online searches and different portals. Hence, we have decided to focus on strengthening our online presence." The Kerala Tourism website launched in 1998 is among the popular tourism websites, Harikishore noted.
"Our Alexa ranking is 15,000, which can be understood in the context that the government of India website ranking is 87,000," he claimed. Alexa is an US based company which provides commercial web traffic data. The tourism department plans to scale up visitors to the website from 3 million now to 5 million over a period of time.
Meanwhile, the department of tourism has outlined a net budget of Rs 190 crore for the current fiscal, of which spending on infrastructure projects would be around Rs 100 crore and around Rs 25 crore is the marketing budget for the fiscal. Harikishore informed that the state had generated Rs 21,000 crore revenue from tourism during 2012-13, of which around Rs 4,500 was from foreign tourists. Last year around 10 million domestic tourists had visited Kerala, while foreign tourist arrival was around 793,000. "Around 8% of the tourists generate nearly 25% of the revenues for the state," Harikishore added.
The Tourism Department is further mulling to start a Spice Route tourism in the lines of the Silk Route Tourism of China. "We have already made a presentation in this regard recently at the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO). We want to move from selling products to selling experiences." The Spice Route that starts from Muziris port in Kerala up to Venice in Italy going through 31 countries could be revived before the modern world.
Already a number of countries have shown interest, Harikishore said adding that the department would make detailed presentations before all the countries to revive the ancient route that connects the heritage of several cultures across continents.
Known for its campaign with the tagline 'God's own Country', Kerala Tourism has launched its new marketing campaign with the tagline 'Your moment is waiting'.
