Tourism India Alliance (TIA), the newest platform willing to advocate, educate and represent the stakeholders of tourism and hospitality industry at large scale has launched at The Park New Delhi in the august presence of the leading lights of tourism and hospitality industry.
The newly launched travel association claims to unlock new horizons for industry representation and tourism growth in India.
While talking to Whereabouts, the founder member, Jagdeep Bhagat said that Tourism India Alliance (TIA) is not in race with any existing travel association, though there has been an enormous gap in terms of connecting with the last member of the industry and TIA will endeavour to minimise that gap.
And, unfortunately the oldest and largest associations were able to connect only with few thousands of stakeholders, whereas rest remained unattended. And, irony is that only few hundred members of these are MoT recognised.
According to him, data provided by an OTA, where around 2,72,000 agents are regularly using the system, only 14,000 are recognised or documented somewhere. That means the number of recognised agents or who’s data available is just 5.1%.
Speaking further, Bhagat said: “The ‘Tourism India Alliance’ is a promising initiative that aims to exploit India’s vast potential in the tourism sector. Therefore, like-minded industry veterans decided to come together and launched a platform to connect and bring on board all kind of agency operators (inbound, outbound, ticketing etc.) not only from tier-one and tier-two cities but from far-flung areas of the country.”
With the aim, to bring a large number of industry stakeholders from unorganised to organised platform, and availed them an opportunity to learn, network and grow their businesses, TIA eyeing to represent the lion’s share of tourism industry stakeholders, at least 1000 members in next six months.
Further speaking on the formation of TIA, Bhagat said: “We have realised that advocacy is much needed, particularly after the pandemic, as all those existing platforms (travel associations i.e. FAITH, TAAI, TAFI, IATO, ADTOI etc.) could not pass on the right message to the government or stakeholders which could have been delivered as the safeguard in the interest of our fraternity.”
“And, more over there was no proper documentation, proper mode which could have been utilised by our industry which suffered the most,’ he added.
Once after getting a reasonable number, Bhagat intend to identify the obstacles in taking Govt certification and work with the Ministry of Tourism so that more industry stakeholders can obtain Govt recognition to get the benefits of subsidies, marketing assistance (MDA) and participation in overseas B2B travel events.
Once after finalising the annual membership fee which is under discussion and expected to be around INR 6000 yearly, the membership of the association will be opened in a week’s time. All agency operators whether it is inbound, outbound, hotelier, ticketing agents or any kind of travel service provider can become the member of this association.
Registered under ROC, Tourism India Alliance is a Not-for-Profit organisation.
