India - Powerhouse Economy for Growth

This is one of the World Travel Market breakout sessions on powerhouse economies, in this case, India.

The session was run by the European Tour Operators Association (ETOA) and this panel  discusses outbound tourism, more specifically the huge potential for outbound tourism and the problems facing Europe in trying to attract some of that business.   

And, of course, it's that old nutshell again...visas.

G20 recognises Travel & Tourism but must try harder

So, the G20 world leaders have finally recognized the importance of travel and tourism as a driver of jobs, growth, and economic recovery.  Considering the industry will contribute around US$2 trillion in GDP and 100 million jobs to the global economy in 2012, its about time. 

When the wider economic impacts of the industry are taken into account, travel and tourism is forecast to contribute some US$6.5 trillion to the global economy and generate 260 million jobs – or 1 in 12 of all jobs on the planet!

The G20 Declaration states: "we recognize the role of travel and tourism as a vehicle for job creation, economic growth, and development, and, while recognizing the sovereign right of States to control the entry of foreign nationals, we will work towards developing travel facilitation initiatives in support of job creation, quality work, poverty reduction, and global growth.”

Meaning what, exactly?

The G20 could boost  international tourist numbers by an additional 122 million, generate an extra US$206 billion in tourism exports and create over 5 million additional jobs by 2015 just by improving visa processes and entry formalities. 

Of the 656 million international tourists who visited G20 countries in 2011, an estimated 110 million needed a visa, many of whom were deterred from traveling by the cost, waiting time, and difficulty of obtaining a visa. Facilitating visas for these tourists, many from some of the world’s fastest-growing source markets such as the BRICs, could stimulate demand, spending, and ultimately create millions of new jobs in the G20 economies.

The issue of visas has been debated for many years, the European Tour Operators Association (ETOA) have conducted research that show that the Schengen area alone is missing out on close to €500m in tourism revenue due to inefficiency. In a case study 21 per cent of Indians applying for Schengen visas gave up because of delays, while the figure was even higher for the UK at 26 per cent.

On a day that the Government announces that it is scrapping GCSEs and re-introducing more 'rigorous' O-Levels back into schools - their report is 'must try harder'.

Across India in three minutes!

Back to a travel related themes and something nice for the weekend. These Time-Lapse films by Mike Matas are really superb.

Here he covers a journey by Auto-Rickshaw from Nepal covering 2000 miles. He takes 3,000 photographs which are compressed into THREE minutes.

Just enjoy!

Journey Across India from Mike Matas on Vimeo.

The New Great Game: The Battle for Africa

The 'Great Game' was a term used to describe the strategic rivalry and conflict between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for supremacy in Central Asia (mostly Afghanistan!) between 1813 and 1907. It was first commonly used by Rudyard Kipling in his novel 'Kim'.

There now seems there is a new Great Game; the battle for African Energy Resources.

India took a leap in Africa on Tuesday, with Prime Minister Singh pledging $5 billion for the Africa's development over the next three years. Spreading out the Indian presence from agriculture to information technology, and medicine to a virtual university, India now rivals China for top honours in the new Great Game in Africa!

India will offer $5 billion dollars for the next three years under lines of credit to help Africa achievesome of its development goals. (To put the figure in perspective, India's healthcare budget is around $ 5.9 billion). This credit would be apart from the $700 million pledged for new institutions in Africa.

India also announced a railway line between Ethiopia and Djibouti at a cost of $300 million. The initial plan by the Africa Union was for a line running across the breadth of Africa, but the task of coordinating land acquisition through so many sovereign states was a challenge they weren't willing to take on (just yet).

China has the biggest presence in Africa, constructing airport terminals and football stadiums at a breathtaking pace, in return for access to resources and minerals. Its bilateral trade with Africa in 2010 was $126.9 billion, as compared to just over $40 billion India-Africa trade. Earlier this week, India declared a target of $70 billion by 2015.

India has had a long-standing relationship with African countries, particularly on the eastern seaboard, but it took a backseat when China went into Africa with deep pockets and insatiable demand for energy and resources.

Since then, India has been playing catch-up, although India prides itself on doing things differently from China. It's 'Sort Power' approach sees itself as less extractive in its engagements and more inclined towards helping African countries improve their capacity. As a senior African diplomat observed, "China invests in our today, India in our tomorrow."

African nations are not unhappy at being the centre of attention and largesse by India and China. Although China is more efficient in the way it processes aid in Africa, India has been actively invited by African leaders themselves as they seek to balance the Chinese presence.

The Indian presence is also mainly in the private sector, unlike the state-driven presence of China. This makes the Indian engagement far less threatening in Africa. Having said that, Indian companies are increasingly getting into mining for coal, copper and more industrial-use metals in different African countries. Indian farmers are engaging in commercial farming in countries like Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. In a recent agreement, Andhra Pradesh will send 500 farmers to become farming entrepreneurs in these countries.

PM Singh declared that India would invite all African airlines to Indian cities over the next three years. That's because no Indian airline now flies to Africa even as Chinese airlines are increasing their flights to the continent. Yet..

India, China, Demographics, Distribution & Consumption Patterns.

The recent PATA 60th anniversary and conference event held at the China World Hotel, Beijing, threw up some interesting sessions on distribution challenges and changing demographics.

Attention was drawn to the huge process of urbanization taking place in both India and China.

Within the next 15 years, China would create cities equal to the size of most in Europe and India was planning to create 115 new airports.

This expansion will see massive increases in the numbers of Indians and Chinese willing, and able, to travel, leading to a major shift in global consumption patterns - even today the average Indian traveling in the U.K spends £792 a week compared to the average American spend in the U.K. of £710 a week.

With 70% of the Indian population under the age of 35, distribution trends will focus on increased marketing through social media and mobile access, while #trending enables industry players to have real-time feedback from consumers, shaping demand, supply, delivery, service, policy and direction.

With a predicted future shortage of skilled workers globally, there is also a real opportunity for India and China.

While in the past, the best hotel chains in India and China would hire expatriates, there will now be a reversal in this trend with the Ritz-Carlton’s and Four Seasons’ turning to India and China for their skilled management.

At the same time Boeing claimed that aviation was going to require training to support the growth in the sector with 126,000 new pilots and a quarter million mechanics need to be recruited and trained!

Cricket World Cup - and the winners are..hotels, airlines and pizzas!

So congratulations to India, well deserved winners in a thrilling final. As well as the team out on the field, there are probably going to be a few other winners as well.

I don't have the figures for this year but last year, corporate India spent an estimated Rs 500-600 crore (GBP 7-8 m) on two cricket tournaments — the IPL and the T20 World Cup.

These tournaments and the many new product launches that accompanied them led to consumer products companies increasing their advertising and promotion (A&P ) spends by 25-40 % in the April-June quarter.

Even this year, the quarters ending March and June are going to see higher adspend by most consumer companies , like HUL, ITC, Godrej Consumer and Dabur and the increase in the consumption of alcohol through the season is also going to be of benefit to market leader United Breweries as is Jubilant Foodworks, a quick service restaurant selling the Domino's Pizzas in India.

The Airlines and hotels sectors will also benefit from this. In February, there was a 15% growth — more than the normal growth of 8-10 % — in the arrival of foreign tourists in comparison to last year's February . Besides business travellers, these include cricket fans from different countries. This would be particularly beneficial to companies such as Indian Hotels Company and EIH which are more dependent on foreign tourists for revenues.

At the same time, many airline companies also increased their ticket prices . For instance, domestic airline companies increased their one-way ticket price of Mumbai-Chandigarh flight from a normal day fare to Rs 24,000 from Rs 6,000 on the day of semi-final cricket World Cup match. Companies like SpiceJet, Indigo Airlines and Kingfisher benefited well from this.

Sorry! Mumbai is full.

As the Cricket World Cup Final draws closer, nearly every starred hotel room in the city has been booked.

If you insist, you can be on the waiting list, in case of last-minute cancellations - not that there are likely to be any what with this being a) the first time a host nation has contested the Cricket World Cup final on home soil and that b) Sachin Tendulkar is up for reaching his 100th Century and that c) Muttiah Muralitharan will be bowling his last ever overs in competitive cricket. This is India and this is cricket after all.

"The position is extremely tight. We don't even have enough rooms for prominent guests," said Kamlesh Barot, president, Hotels & Restaurants Association Western India (HRAWI) which has a membership of over 1,200 hotels in the western region of Maharashtra, Goa and Gujarat.

There are around 9,000 rooms in star-rated hotels in Mumbai. According to hotel industry sources, even the approximately 11,000 hotel rooms in the unorganized sector have been booked.

"There are waiting lists. In case of last-minute cancellations, people will be accommodated," Barot said.

Guests from across the country and even from abroad are making a beeline to the city's hotels. Hotel industry sources said it was high time a city like Mumbai expanded its capacity of hosting guests by increasing the number of rooms.

"The availability of 9,000 rooms in star-rated hotels is very low for the financial capital. Cities like NYC, Los Angeles and London have abundant resources for tourists and guests," a senior corporate official who travels frequently across prominent cities said.

A senior government official said the guests, including major corporates, who had booked stands and pavilions at the Wankhede, had made bulk bookings. "There is no option for others but to wait or they can go to hotels in the unorganized sector, including lodges," said the official who could not book rooms for his guests.

My money is on India by the way. And for Tendulkar to get his 100th century..

The Most Difficult Languages to Speak??

I'm proud that I can get by in a few languages, French, German, Spanish and some would say English (I'm from Yorkshire.!) - but here's a recent list I read of the most difficult languages for English speakers to get to grips with..


1. Arabic

Arabic breaks down into families. One is the Modern Standard Arabic of print, media, and online content. The other is spoken Arabic, which encompasses many colloquial dialects which vary by region. This means that if you pick up conversational Arabic in Tunisia, it might still be tough to be understood in Kuwait.

For all dialects of Arabic, pronunciation is difficult for English speakers, as many consonants are formed at the back of the mouth.

Arabic script is a phonetic, 28-symbol alphabet descending from Phonecian. Most letters change shape depending on their position in the word, and letters may or may not be joined. The most basic challenge in tackling written Arabic is in reading from right to left, working against an English speaker’s deeply embedded instinct.

Arabic grammar has very few parallels with English and Indo-European languages. The plural is expressed by changing the vowel structure of the word: kitab (book) becomes kutub (books). The bulk of verbs are irregular and can be formed 25 ways. It’s a logical grammar system, but a complicated one too.

2. Basque

In a study conducted by the British Foreign Office, Basque was ranked as the hardest language to learn. Geographically surrounded by Romance languages, it is one of the only language isolates of Europe, with no syntactic parallels to English. The regional dialects are highly diverged, though a standardized Basque is used for media and academics.

Basque is agglutinative, meaning that words are formed and modified with prefixes and suffixes. While “law” is lege in Basque, the phrase “according to the law” would be structured by suffixes as “legearen arabera.” Instead of prepositions, Basque uses cases endings to show the relationship between words, such as mendi (mountain) and mendira (to the mountain). It sounds simple, but with eleven cases, each taking four forms, the grammar is complex.

Basque is written in the Roman alphabet and pronunciation is fairly easy, even with new consonant sounds like tx or tz.

3. Cantonese

Cantonese is a tonal language, which is challenging for English speakers who are used to speaking with emphasis (“I didn’t eat YOUR sandwich!”) and inflection, rising tones to pose a question. Cantonese can be difficult even for those fluent in other Chinese dialects because of its tonal system. While Mandarin has four tones, Cantonese has eight, with pitch and contour shaping a syllable’s meaning.

Chinese has a logographic (pictoral) writing system of 5000+ characters. This presents a new hurtle to language learning, since a reader of Cantonese can’t sound out syllables in a text as we can with phonetic alphabets. They must know and recall the name of each character.


4. Finnish

Finnish is in the Finno-Ugric language family, with Estonian and Hungarian. Without Germanic or Latin influence, Finnish vocabulary is completely alien to English speakers. Its grammar is also somewhat notorious. There are fifteen noun cases, sometimes with subtle differences. Talotta means “without a house,” while talolta means “from a house.” Tricky.

There are six verb types, classed by their stems. These stems alter as the verbs are conjugated. The language is agglutinative and verbs are conjugated with a succession of suffixes.

But, Finnish is written as it sounds (in the Roman alphabet), and pronunciation is comfortable for English speakers. A common speaking problem lies in remembering single or double vowel sounds, as in tuli (fire) and tuuli (wind).

5. Hungarian

Though it uses the Roman alphabet for writing, Hungarian is tricky. Unique vowel sounds (á,é,ó,ö,ő,ú,ü,ű,í) and consonant clusters (ty, gy, ny, sz, zs, dzs, dz, ly, cs) make it difficult for English tongues to read and pronounce Hungarian.

Instead of articles, Hungarian conjugates verbs in one of two ways for definite and indefinite objects. Olvasok könyvet means “I read a book,” while Olvasom a könvyet is “I read the book.”

Because possession, tense, and number are indicated by suffixes, not word order in a sentence, Hungarian sentence structure is very loose and flexible. Sounds forgiving for a novice speaker, huh? The truth is that any sentence can take on several meanings if the suffixes are altered slightly. It’s a confusing system to learn.


6. Japanese

The good news is that pronunciation is easy. Japanese vowel and consonant sounds are familiar to those fluent in English, which makes the language easy to parrot and understand.

But written Japanese can be a headache to learn. It uses four alphabets including the Chinese-influenced kanji (pictoral), two phonetic writing systems, and the Roman alphabet (Romanji).

The notion of honorific language is challenging for learners. Japanese speech can vary with levels of politeness, with each level having set forms and rules. English has no set way of speaking honorifically or intimately, and learners may have trouble recalling when and where to use honorific speech.

Grammatically, Japanese is a mixed bag. There are only three irregular verbs and a pretty consistent structure, with verbs at the end of the sentence. Nouns carry no gender or number, though they can function as adjectives or adverbs, which can be confusing for readers.


7. Navajo

The Navajo language was used as a code by US forces in World War Two. In the Pacific battles, Japanese codebreakers cracked other allied dialects and coded language. They could never decipher Navajo.

Navajo is a verb-centred language. Even adjectives have no direct translation into Navajo; descriptions are given through verbs. It’s a prefix-heavy language, with 25 kinds of pronominal prefixes which can be stacked onto one another. This forms incredibly long phrases like chidí naaʼnaʼí beeʼeldǫǫhtsoh bikááʼ dah naaznilígíí which means “army tank.”

Another feature unique to Navajo is animacy, wherein nouns will take on certain verbs according to their rank in the hierarchy of animation. Humans and lightning are highest, children and big animals come next, and abstractions sit at the bottom. It’s a fascinating aspect of the language and culture, but a tough one to memorize and put into practice.


8. Mandarin

Written Mandarin is pictoral and contains over 20,000 characters. Some base characters, like root words, appear in other symbols, like (the character for “woman” forming part of “sister.” The written form of the language has no phonic connection to the spoken form.

Mandarin, like Cantonese, is a tonal language, and a misused inflection can change the meaning of a sentence. The syllable “ma” can mean mother or horse, depending on the inflection!

Grammatically, Mandarin is easy than some Indo-European languages. Words, for the most part, have only one grammatical form. Their function is shown through prepositions, word order and particles. Building and comprehending this syntax, however, takes time. There are some tough elements like Mandarin adverbs: a dozen words which have no direct English translation.

9. Korean

At first, the language seems far easier than other East Asian tongues. No tones! No pictoral writing system!

It’s true that reading and writing in Korean is easy to master, as the language uses the very logical Hangul phonetic written system. Speaking and listening, while tone-free, can be challenging with unique sounds that are hard for English speakers to recognize, let alone master.

The biggest challenge with Korean lies in the grammar. Verbs can be conjugated hundreds of ways, depending on tense, mood, age and seniority.

Like Japanese, one sentence can be said in three different ways, depending on the relationship between the speaker and addressee. Adjectives are conjugated too, with hundreds of possible endings. Also, there are also two different number systems, quite different from one another.

If anyone else has any suggestions, I'd like to know...what about Hindu???

Indian Airlines Set To Expand

It looks as though India's aviation industry is set to become a major employer once again.

The President of IndiGo, Mr Aditya Ghosh, stated that the airline will be adding between 1,000 and 1,200 staff members during this calendar year. “We will be hiring close to 400-500 cabin crew and about 400-odd airport personnel,” he said. Mr Ghosh, however, refused to speculate on how many people the airline will hire when it starts inducting the 180 Airbus aircraft that it has ordered.

Similarly, SpiceJet also plans to hire 1,000 crew and 40 pilots, while Air India Express plans to hire about 700 persons. About three years ago some airlines had to prune their staff strength due to weak passenger demand and rising input costs.

The increase in activity is mainly due to the increase in number of domestic passengers flown on a monthly basis compared with the previous year. Since this trend is expected to continue over the next few years, most airlines are taking steps to capture a larger share of the market. This includes not only hiring more support staff but also utilising more aircraft in their fleets.

While IndiGo plans to acquire 180 Airbus aircraft, Jet Airways has an order book of 49 aircraft which will be a mix of both Airbus and Boeing. In July last year, SpiceJet had signed a deal with Boeing to acquire 30 Boeing 737 at an estimated value of $2.7 billion.

“From the demand side, the Indian market is well positioned for growth for the next three to five years. The air traffic demand is likely to remain strong on the back of growth in the Indian economy, high disposable incomes and rising middle class aspirations.

“A majority of the air traffic still comes from the top six to eight metro destinations and has not extended to the tier-2 and -3 cities. However, with privatisation of 35 non-metro airports that scenario should change,” Mr Kapil Arora, Partner, Ernst & Young, said.

Something for the Weekend..

Something a little different for a change.

Nice piece by Niladri Kumar.

We just love the electric sitar.

The Spice is Right..

Congratulations to SpiceJet, the low-cost carrier for the Indian domestic market, which has just secured recognition at the World Travel Market for it's growth and multi-channel approach to distribution.

World Travel Market Chairman Fiona Jeffery presented an award to the carrier’s CEO Sanjay Aggarwal, at today’s WTM 30th Anniversary VIP Opening & Reception Ceremony.

SpiceJet currently connects 18 domestic destinations with 125 daily departures. The depth of its network provides customers a variety of options for interconnecting flights, giving them access to second tier destinations via connections at major hubs.

It has been growing recently, despite the economic pressures. SpiceJet increased its daily departures from 98 in October 2008 to 125 by May 2009. Its market has increased from 7.9% in September 2008 to 12.8% in June 2009, making it the fastest growing airline in India during this period. During the first seven months of the current year, SpiceJet’s passenger traffic has grown 14% compared to a 5% decline in the overall Indian domestic traffic.

Unlike many other low-cost airlines, it has a multi-channel approach to sales - 24% of bookings come directly from consumers booking at www.spicejet.com, 14% book through its call centers, online travel agents account for 30% with offline travel agents its largest sales channel with 32%.

It differs from other low-cost carriers by having a cargo business, which covers 13 stations. It has carried more than 19000 tones of cargo since May 2008. This side of the business currently contributes more than 3% of its total revenue.

Overall, it deserves credit for having made a profit while growing during an economic slowdown In the first three months of the year it made a profit of INR 26.3 crores (£3.6m) after two quarters of near breakeven numbers.