By Pramod Kumar Jha
New Delhi, Feb 21 (IANS) After the outbreak of Novel Coronavirus in China, Indian tourists have turned to Western countries instead of Eastern ones. Tourists going abroad for picnics now like to go to Western countries including Europe, America. People associated with the tourism industry said that people traveling to China in connection with the business have cancelled their tours. At the same time, tourism in Eastern countries including Malaysia, Singapore has been affected.
Asked about the impact of the Coronavirus on the Indian tourism business, Ajay Jaipuria, Managing Director of Travel Oysters, told IANS that outbound tourism has been severely affected, as China’s tourism has almost come to a standstill.
He said that travel to Malaysia and Singapore have also been affected by about 20 per cent, while tourists visiting Hong Kong have reduced by about 25 per cent.
Jaipuria said that there has been a decrease in tourists coming from the Oriental countries. However, there has been a slight increase in tourists coming to and from Europe and America, because these countries have issued advisories to tourists to not to visit some countries, India is not included in the list.
Devang Riya, Director of Visa.com, a visa-related business company, said that around 500 people were going to China, who have cancelled their tour.
He said that at this time no one wants to go to China and Vietnam, although the number of tourists visiting Europe, America, Middle East and Australia has increased slightly.
Dewang said, “People go China more for business purposes instead of visiting the country, but they are not visiting China at the moment. Our daily Visa productivity, which was 300, has been completely exhausted. If we talk about the whole trade, the daily visa would be 2,000-3,000, that is not happening at all because the people going to the Chinese embassy for the visa are negligible.”
However, hotel industry-related businessmen say that the Coronavirus outbreak in China has not yet had any significant impact on the hotel business in India.
Sanjeev Nair, Managing Director of Welcome Heritage Group, a company associated with the hotel business, said his business has had a slight impact, especially in Rajasthan where the number of foreign tourists reaching his hotels has decreased.
Another tourism-related businessman told that people who used to travel to the eastern countries for picnics, nowadays have started to travel to different tourist places of the country.
In China, the number of people who died of the deadly coronavirus has increased to 2,118, while the number of people suffering from it has also risen to 74,576. Health officials gave this information on Thursday.
(Pramod Kumar Jha can be contacted at [email protected])
–IANS