14th ATOAI Convention to discuss Future Challenges and Opportunities in Adventure Travel

The much awaited annual conference of Adventure Tour Operators Association of India (ATOAI) taking place in Araku Valley from January 17-20, 2019 not only promises a larger participation from the industry stakeholders who will explore new avenues of working together, but to discover the means & ways of promoting adventure tourism in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

Araku Valley – the convention venue located at a height of 3,200 feet in the midst of the hills of Anantagiri is a beautiful and enchanting hill station. The salubrious climate, musically gurgling streams, the rainbow-creating waterfalls and lush green landscape can offer a memorable escape from the city life. The valley is located about 112kms away from Visakhapatnam.

Chairman Convention Vaibhav Kala speaks more about the importance and salient features of the event. Here are the important points of the conversation.

Q. How important is this Convention for the travel agents and tourism stakeholders of this country?
Ans: The ATOAI convention is the national gathering of adventure travel professionals in the country; so qualified, specialist, domain experts in this niche segment of travel. It has emerged as an important event as it showcases though leadership, new opportunities, fresh challenges, flags call-to-action issues, seeks to explore what the emerging destinations and activities are, and lastly – offers a fantastic backdrop to meet peers, learn, and explore new avenues of working together.

Q. How do you look at the potential of Andhra Pradesh in adventure tourism segment?
Ans: For a largely hill state, the region offers what adventure travel needs – natural resource. It has caves, hill, gradient, water bodies, is not densely populated and has large areas and vast swathes of terrain that could be developed or used to make it an important emerging adventure travel destination.

Q. Kindly elaborate on the format of the convention?
Ans: The format is mostly based over recent ATOAI formats of speaker driven sessions to make learning and listening interesting, less of panel based discussions. Araku convention is being vitalized by a great activity schedule which will have delegates explore and experience paramotoring, hot air ballooning, zorbing, high ropes, zip line, kayaking and ATVs.

The conference and exhibition arena is set in the outdoors at the Forest Institute which was recently also the venue for the Andhra Pradesh Cabinet meeting.  Interspersed with sessions, networking, and activity away from the resident enclave ; the evenings are opportunities to savor local Dimsa dance, exchange moments of each others notable moments, renew and make new alliances.

Q. How has been the year 2018 from associations’ point of view; what were the major initiatives that you would like to talk about?
Ans: The year 2018 was notable as we launched the Adventure Travel Safety Guidelines which herald a new area of safety in adventure travel across all States. This will be a landmark in the adventure travel timeline in India.  We helped bring the biggest gathering of overseas buyers through ATTA to Bhopal at AdventureNext, which we aim to propagate across the country to other States. We helped with the Kerela floods by sending a team to help with rescue, we cleaned up the Gangotri route and Stok Kangri basecamps, trained over a 100 guides in CPR and First Aid in Uttarakhand.

HIGHLIGHTS 

‘Moments of Inspiration’ by Lt. Col. Dr. Srinivas Gokulnath
An aerospace medicine specialist, the Lt. Col. will talk about his experiences – self-belief, failure and success, accepting challenges, humility and teamwork, and above all devising strategies and respecting them. In August 2018, this intrepid bicyclist became the first Indian to complete solo, the 2200 kilometer-long Race Around Austria, considered among Europe’s premiere endurance races in cycling.

‘Moments of Inspiration’ by Anusha Subramanium
Anusha will be sharing her very unique Kilimanjaro experience with us at the convention. She is an award winning journalist and a British Chevening Scholar. She started her journalism career 20 years ago as a general news reporter with Mid-Day in Mumbai. She has also worked with The Observer of Business & Politics, Business Standard, and Hindustan Times.

‘Brand Positioning’ by Dilshad Master Kumar
With so many different operators occupying this nice space, how do you distinguish yourself from the rest? How do you make yourself stand apart? What is your USP? How do you decide that? A step-by-step approach that will help you think how you want to position your company. And then, an interactive exercise that you can put to use, when you get in to work on Monday morning!

‘Top 10 Tips to Make Travel Pics/Videos on Your Smartphone’ by Anubhav Roy
Anubhav may be young, but he certainly isn’t a green horn! His Youtube channel has over 140,000 subscribers and his videos on the best video apps, the best android apps for photography and the best editing softwares collectively has over 1 million views! So fish out your smartphones – it’s time to learn some new tricks!

Women in Adventure Travel. Panel Discussion
 In a world where women still make less money than their male counterparts and where household chores and childcare fall disproportionately on their shoulders, the odds of having the chance to get out and adventure in the first place are still smaller for women. How can we change that? How do we get more women entrepreneurs into the adventure travel business? What do we, as an adventure travel community, need to do, to get women step out of the supporting roles they’re usually in and come to the forefront? Hear it from the ladies themselves. An eye-opening session for sure.

‘Customer Loyalty’ by Brian Almeida
Brian Almeida is a serial entrepreneur and business leader. He has worked with Fortune 100 companies, helping them bring the ‘Customer’ back into focus and center of business, through a focus on customer insight. How do we use the customer data we have at our disposal? Does customer loyalty = quality? Does customer satisfaction guarantee their return? What are the key basic influencers of customer loyalty and which of them apply to the travel trade? What is relationship marketing and how does one keep in touch with clients outside of simply selling them “the next best trip/destination”? Brian is there to help us answer the questions above and take in your questions as well.

‘Social Media Marketing’ by Shubho Sengupta
Shubho Sengupta is a well-respected Digital Marketing Consultant and works with some of the top brands in the country including Coca Cola, Tata Tea, Mahindra and Times of India. His focus is to help them set up or enhance their existing digital capabilities and aligning their ‘digital’ strategies (consumer facing) with their business objectives.
Is there any point in using Facebook ads unless we hit a threshold budget after which we begin to see ROIs? LinkedIn and Twitter? How does an adventure travel company benefit from these platforms? How do hashtags work? Why are they useful? Shubho will there to help you answer some of these raging questions you face everyday in your business.