MP Tourism shelves London road show plan

BHOPAL: Madhya Pradesh State Tourism Development Corporation plan to organise a road show in London to woo foreign tourists has been cancelled with the state currently laying stress on attracting investment and promoting tourism through Public Private Partnership (PPP) model.
Tourism officials say they could not get permission from the state government to go ahead with the tourism promotion campaign in the United Kingdom.
As per the ambitious plan of the corporation, a road show was to be organized in London in August. The objective was to market the exotic locations of MP to overseas tourists and to earn foreign currency in return.
In May, MPSTDC chairman Mohan Yadav had planned advertisements in foreign print media to make the event a big hit. "The road show in London has been cancelled. We could not get the permission from the state government. Currently the emphasis is on investment opportunities in the state to promote tourism through the public-private partnership model and creating land banks for developing tourism infrastructure," chief general manager (operations and marketing) Om Vijay Choudahry said.
Earlier, a proposal had come up for consideration to have a state tourism brand ambassador-like superstar Amitabh Bachchan promoting Gujarat. However, the plan was dropped following a realization that such brand ambassadors could only help attract domestic tourists while the state needs to go international. When the issue came up, the tourism corporation argued that a Bollywood personality as brand ambassador would not help attract foreign tourists. It would only add to domestic tourists that have already gone up from around two crore in 2008 to close to 4.5 cores in 2011.
Number of foreign tourists visiting Madhya Pradesh has remained at only 2.5 lakh during the past four years. And those visited broadly preferred only six destinations of Bandhavgarh, Khajuraho, Orchha, Kanha, Gwalior and Panna.
Year- No. of foreign tourists
2008-251733
2009-200819
2010-250430
2011-269559