Tourism delegation to embark on US tour for road show

Panaji:

Tourism

minister Manohar Azgaonkar and chairman Goa Tourism Development Corporation (GTDC)

Nilesh Cabral

will be on a week-long US tour from May 20 to attend a road show.

Chief secretary Dharmendra Sharma and deputy director tourism will also be part of the delegation to US, sources said.

Goa tourism, in the past, has been criticised for randomly choosing long-haul foreign destinations such as US and

Australia

for marketing and promotional activities.

A tourism stakeholder, opposed to marketing Goa in the US, said it was a “wasted investment”. “The US has better beaches than we do. Besides, we don’t have much to offer them. So why would they visit Goa?” he said.

Former tourism director U D Kamat told TOI that, in the 1990s, former chief minister

Pratapsingh Rane

had declined tourism department the permission to accept an invite to visit US for a similar reason. “He had put a note to that effect,” Kamat said.

US tourist arrivals in Goa remain at less than 2% of the state’s total tourist footfall.

The tourism department’s website shows that the footfalls from the country dropped to 1% in 2016 after showing a slight growth in 2015 when it received 12,227 visitors

In 2017, Goa received around 8.9 lakh foreign tourists, witnessing a growth of about 30% in overall foreign tourist arrivals.