Open international travel borders, extend free tourist e-visas and begin marketing, says FAITH

New Delhi, Feb 7 (IANS) FAITH, the policy federation of all the national associations representing the complete tourism, travel and hospitality industry of India (ADTOI, ATOAI, FHRAI, HAI, IATO, ICPB, IHHA, ITTA, TAAI, TAFI) has placed an urgent request on the opening up of India's international borders to tourists and to permit all commercial flights in full strength to operate to and fro from India.

FAITH said, that Indian inbound travel and outbound travel industry has been shut for the past 23 months. In the pre-COVID year of 2019-20 Indian travel industry had received almost 10.9 mn foreign tourists and almost $30 bn (Rs 2.12 lakh crore) in revenue and was engaged in travel planning for almost 26.9 mn outbound travellers from India.

Both of those two lines of businesses have been completely closed rendering huge distress, unemployment and financial burden on employees and enterprises of Indian travel industry in the absence of that work.

A lot of countries have now opened or have announced opening up their borders to fully vaccinated travellers with the impact of Omicron subsiding.

FAITH has requested MOT to take up with Ministry of Health, the same for India and announce the opening up of our borders and resumption of full commercial flights with zero quarantine to fully vaccinated travellers across all Indian ports.

FAITH has also requested for extension of the free e-visa from the currently announced 0.5 million for the whole duration of 2022-2024 till our inbound travel recovers.

To ensure that Indian tourism is able to regain and then build on its market share of 1 per cent which was pre-Covid in the global inbound travel, FAITH has asked for immediate rollout of global marketing campaign across all digital, print, electronic and OOH media in all global markets of India.

--IANS

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