India to eye outbound Chinese travellers

New Delhi, Jan 11 (UNI) The Tourism Ministry will soon launch its first web portal targeting an Asian country-- China --as part of its strategy to promote the "Incredible India" campaign among its neighbours to improve the foreign tourist arrivals.

The portal will be in Chinese language to take Indian tourism right to the homes of the millions of the Chinese people, a majority of whom are not comfortable with English.

''We already have the Incredible India websites in different foreign languages like Spanish, German, French and Italian languages. The impact is really tremendous," a top tourism official told UNI here today.

He said though the arrival of foreign tourists into India had been going up every year, there had been a gap in attracting the inbound tourists from Asian countries, especially China.

India had been registering a growth of 12 to 15 per cent increase in the foreign tourist arrival since it launched the "Incredible India" campaign with a huge publicity fund five years ago.

However, the share of foreign tourist arrival to India constituted a negligible percentage as compared to world tourism figures.

The official said the Tourism Ministry would organise roadshows in Beijing and Shanghai after the launch of the Chinese version of the Incredible India website.

The Ministry has been negotiating with China's airlines and tour operators to work out India-specific tour packages linking Buddhist centres for the outbound Chinese travellers.

"We intend to do more to cash in on the huge Chinese tourism market," the official said, pointing out the projections of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that the number of annual outbound Chinese tourists would touch the figure of 100 million by 2020 from the present 12 million.

UNI