Brand USA, which is the popular tourism promotion agency of the United States, is working to shift along its strategy to tune well with the existing and ever changing market dynamics. They are doing so to maintain proper growth momentum in the Indian market at the moment. Owing to that, they have decided to replace “India Sales Mission” to the “Travel Week India”.
After Europe, India is the next country to host the Brand USA Travel Week after Europe. In the sidelines of the 8th travel mission 2019, Jackie Ennis, Senior Director, Global Trade Development for Brand USA suggested and clarified a few prospects altogether.
According to Ennis, they completed their Travel Week Europe recently in the beginning of September. Based on their reports, it is a new way of doing business in Europe and the associated spots. For them, it is a way to bring together all the buyers from around Europe as well as USA’s destinations and then conduct the much needed discussions and the meetings about the existing realm of the market.
In a similar fashion, the ‘India Travel Week’ is going to be conducted in New Delhi in 2020. As mentioned before, India is the second most important market for the Travel Week Programme. The same is expected to be a 5-days programme starting from October 5 till October 9th, 2020. The main objective of this is to focus on educating the Indian travel with the help of the augmented content.
If the reports from the Travel Week Europe are to be considered, it was mentioned that the same ended up attracting around 87 US exhibitors along with 180 of the pre qualified buyers from around 20 different European countries.
Ennis expects the participation of 60 companies as well as organizations in the very first week of the Travel Week India. Their main objective is to have a better and deeper understanding of the demands as well as the prevailing trends that waiver the Indian market to the US suppliers. The India Travel Mission was a multi city event but the Travel Week India is going to specifically hosted in New Delhi and attended by the buyers and companies from pan-India.
Addressing the performance of the Indian market, Ennis highlighted saying that the market value and the sales in India have doubled over the last seven years.
In 2018 itself, USA experienced the 1.4 million Indian travelers to the country which was a surge by 7.2% in comparison to the year before. Keeping this in source, the same was ranked at the 10th position in the specific source market. She further emphasised saying that the Brand USA targets around 22 countries, but also witnessed that India ranked the 5th when it came to the visitor spending.
Further reports and statistics collected suggest that Brand USA is again going to witness further increase in the arrivals in India. Just in July this year, the Indian arrivals did spike up by a whopping 7% irrespective of some of the challenges that were faced along. The main goal here is to bring forth 1.9 million visitors by 2023.
With all these assumptions, the main factors in this plays a major role is the connectivity. They are expecting to add in more of the non-stop flights to further enhance the possibilities of growth in their market.
Ennis also said that trade is also a quintessential part in all this. All of the destinations around look around and emphasise on the trade as this channels in better resources further more. Their main focus is to emphasise more on touching the important prospects in this. It could be around in retail, sales or even the other ongoing trends.
The enhanced outreach of the digital mediums and the technology is further streamlining the opportunities for trades and such, which is further an added bonus. It is actually very important to work around with trade without fail.
Brand USA is working to reauthorize the Brand USA programme in 2020. The reauthorization is expected to last for further of the coming seven years as all the associated segments around are focusing on supporting the continuation of the Brand USA at the moment.
By Somapika Dutta
