Boosted by TTOS success, INDIAN TRAVEL TRADE ENTHUSED BY MEETINGS AT INDABA

With the visas to South Africa finally becoming easier under the TTOS scheme of South African Government, Indian travel trade participated enthusiastically in Africa’s Travel Indaba at Durban, looking to boost tourism flow not only to South Africa, but also other African nations.

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Barely four months after the South African government introduced Trusted Travel Operator Scheme (TTOS), a new scheme to ease issuing of visas for Chinese and Indian travellers, the impact of its success is not only being seen in the number of visas issued to Indian visitors, but also in the optimism of the Indian travel trade participating in Africa’s Travel Indaba that was held in May in Durban in South Africa.

In many ways, the discussions at Indaba centred around the urgent need for improving accessibility as well as connectivity of South Africa and other African nations with the key markets, notably the emerging Asian markets with large potential such as China and India.

Inaugurating the fair in Durban, South African Tourism Minister Patricia de Lille underscored the growing importance of the two Asian giants as source markets for South Africa and said that the measures taken by the South African government to ease visa norms

received positive feedback from Asian travel trade members, notably Chinese and Indian travel agents.

“The second phase of our TTOS has been launched to recruit tour operators from India and China. And when I checked yesterday, more than 75 tour operators from China and India had applied. What does that do? It drives up demand for more flights and now we are able to engage with airlines to show them that the demand is there,’’ said de Lille.

However, she added that it was too early to measure the impact of TTOS on tourism traffic from India and China to South Africa.