Following a highly successful post-pandemic destination launch in India last year, Taiwan Tourism Administration (TTA) is now actively broadening its marketing and trade outreach efforts in India in order to solidify on gains that’s been built so far. The national tourism office of Taiwan has recently concluded two key trade engagement and educational events at Kochi and Kolkata aimed at creating a larger source market footprints across India.
A first such event at the South Indian city of Kochi by TTA, the event was an educational seminar. The high-tea event was attended by leading Taiwanese DMCs, Top Holidays and Apple Travel Services, whereas Singapore Airline was the partner airline to the event. Aimed at educating city’s travel trade on Taiwan’s diverse FIT and MICE offerings, the event was attended by some 30 leading travel agents and tour operators actively engaged in outbound tourism business.
The road show in Kolkata, a hitherto untapped market for Taiwan, also aimed at educating the city’s travel trade on Taiwan’s FIT and MICE offerings. India’s fourth largest city-economy and capital of one of the strongest outbound tourism source markets in India, West Bengal, the Kolkata roadshow had Thai Airways as the partner airline and some 50 agents attended the event.
Commenting on the two events, Paul Shih, Director – TTA Singapore Office, said, “India is a very diverse market and there are tremendous opportunities to exploit across the country. We saw some surprising response from our last year’s Educational Seminar with airline partner in the South Indian cities of Bangaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad. The two events were strategic extension of our trade outreach, engagement and educational programme that we have carried in India over the last year and half. Kochi gave opportunity to penetrate deep in the South India market, whereas Kolkata roadshow was our first post-pandemic push in the region and was aimed at opening East Indian market, particularly West Bengal.”
TTA made a determined comeback to India in January 2024 with strategic market-focussed plans. Taiwan recorded a robust 20.81% growth in Indian visitor arrivals last year and has since further strengthened its growth to 22.01% year-on-year for the January-May period this year.
“TTA is committed to long-term strategic approach and position Taiwan as a premier destination for high-end luxury and MICE travellers. These events will help enhance our destination appeal and visibility for HNI, FIT, incentives and luxury corporate travellers through strategic partnerships with airlines and travel agencies in these regions. We want to visit these places again and again and convince our travel industry friends that we are quite serious about forming new partnerships in order to develop these markets,” Shih further stressed.
The two events are aligned to TTA’s strategic goal of gradually expanding its destination marketing and trade outreach activations, while also introducing new products such as Golf Tourism that was recently introduced in the Indian market. Through such expanding activations, TTA aims to strengthen partnerships with travel industry professionals across a wider geography in order to increase the number of Indian tourists to Taiwan.
